Notes from Maine - 2025/07/20
We engaged in barn maintenance this week.
When I bought this house (23 years ago) it wasn’t equipped for horses. The house is more than 200 years old, so I imagine that previous residents kept animals at some point. The last people turned the barn into a wing which had stalls for old people instead of cows, pigs, sheep, and horses. This house was a nursing home forty years ago.
The first year I lived here, we fenced in the pasture and I built a barn. It was my first barn. Plenty of mistakes were made. All things considered, it has held up well. My neighbor across the street, Steve, consulted and helped with some of the trickier tasks. His family has lived on this road for more than a century and they have a giant herd of cattle / butcher shop. Steve brought over an excavator to help with the foundation piers, a giant hammer drill to create the hole for the water pipe, and a ton of experience. Todd and I plumbed the cold water fifty feet down the wing but missed sweating one joint. Steve was there, shoving a slice of bread into the pipe to soak up the water so the joint could be repaired after water sprayed everywhere.
One of the things that Steve helped me put in was a frost-free hydrant. When I say he “helped me” put it in, I mean that he dug the trench, helped fix the plumbing (as I mentioned above), and taught me what a “frost-free hydrant” was. Previously, I was ignorant on the subject. We installed an underground pipe under the frost line from the house to the barn. That attaches to a long pipe with a spigot that’s in the barn and the valve underground. It doesn’t freeze because every time you turn it off the water drains out of the bottom.
This was all new to me when Steve brought it by a couple of decades ago. Before I knew about frost-free hydrants, I’m not sure how I intended to get water to the barn. Maybe I was just going to carry it from the laundry room? In the years since, I’ve also learned about how to maintain a frost-free hydrant. Because I rely on it several times a day, every five years or so I rebuild the guts of the hydrant, installing a new stopper, packing, and packing nut.
This year, the worst thing happened.
Mom and I took the head off successfully (two giant pipe wrenches and a lot of force), and then pulled out the long rod from the inner pipe. Because this hydrant is inside the barn, we had to angle the rod so it could extend up into the attic of the barn until it cleared the pipe. When it finally came free, there was no stopper on the end of the rod. It was still at the bottom of the pipe, eight feet (2.5m) down. I threaded the rod back down, praying that everything would align and I could screw it back into the inaccessible stopper. There was no chance—the rod isn’t perfectly straight and there’s no way to get it centered in the pipe so it would align with the old stopper’s threads. I knew that I was going to have to spend a couple of days digging up the hydrant and installing a new one.
When hope was all but lost, we got lucky. Somehow the rod caught a thread and I ran inside for a drill. Spinning it clockwise, I pulled up. While the rod seated deeper into the stopper we got the stopper out and all was good. We soaked everything to clean away rust, lubricated all the parts, and got it back together. There are few things around here that I count on more than access to water in the barn. Earl (giant shire horse) easily drinks 50 gallons (190 liters) a day in the summer.
One day I should plan on installing another water source. For now, I’m just going to count myself lucky and enjoy the newly-rebuilt hydrant.
Lilly (little filly) used to be very shy when I would shove the water hose into the bucket to give her a refill. She would hide behind her mom and watch with wide eyes. Lately she has decided that it’s fun to shove her nose in a bucket with the swirling water and splash it around. She doesn’t drink as much as her dad, but I think she likes water just as much.
