Hide and Seek

Lately, we have been noticing a little problem over in the front side of our yard. On Thursday, I was out playing football with Zach and when I missed one of his throws, I turned to get it. As I was walking toward the ball, something caught my eye over in the very corner of our property. When I went over to look, I discovered this:



Jeremiah had mentioned it had been a little soggy in that corner the last few times he's mowed the lawn, but we hadn't seen anything like this. It appears it had been that way for a few days and the people the neighbors have mow their lawn have dug into the grass with the lawnmower wheels. But apparently they didn't say anything because the neighbors had no idea there was a problem out there.

Well, after a little detective work, we pretty much came to the conclusion that the problem was with our sprinkler system somewhere. Luckily, my Dad told me to make some maps of the sprinkler lines when we were putting it in, so we pretty much knew basically where everything was. Since the front yard was soggy about 2/3 up our front fence and not at all in the back, we were sure the leak was in the front. Luckily, there was only one trench in that area, so once we found the pipe, we (I say we, but really it was all Jeremiah) dug up and down the line a bit and were sure we'd find a leak.



Of course we didn't. Thinking that was the only place it could possibly leak from, we decided not to water for 24 hours and see if the "problem area" was any less soggy. After waiting that long and worrying about it all night, Jeremiah came home from work and the spot was "less soggy." After digging up a bit more of the front yard and realizing it just wasn't in that location, we decided that maybe it might be leaking from the same line, but just on the other side of the fence. So Friday, Jeremiah dug up that side of the fence, trying to find it. Since we didn't have a gate on that side and we got tired of walking all the way around the house every time we wanted to go from the front to the back, we also decided to take a part of the fence down.











After much frustration and lots of saying "where in the world is it?" we did finally find it. Turns out the sprinkler we have right there had the problem. One of the clamps on the pipe and connection piece wasn't working right. So after putting on a new clamp and making sure the leaking had stopped, we thought it was ironic that we had to dig up that much of the yard just to fix a little clamp only 3 inches in diameter. Needless to say, it was quite a mess and I'm sure our yard looked extremely strange to anyone passing by.



Even though it could have been worse (i.e. we could have had tons of lines in that area that we would have had to check), it's hard to imagine since it was already such a mess. It's funny (at least now it is) because we were just getting our yard looking the way we wanted it and then we had to go and tear a section of it up. Oh well, such is life I guess!