This week has been pretty uneventful as far as our house building is concerned.  They were supposed to have started forming the footings this week, but the only thing that has been done is some formwork and some rebar have been dropped off at the property.  Let’s hope they start Monday!

Beyond that, they keep drilling for the well.  Early in the week they found an aquifer of water at about 60 feet deep, with a rate of only 6 gallons per minute.  Being that shallow and with only gravel/sand above it, it’s considered an “unconfined aquifer” and not ideal for a well used for potable water.  In addition to that, with such a low flow, we told them to keep going.  Towards the end of the week, Matt told us that at 170’ deep they hit rock, so they needed to put on a new drill head. They’re now at 190’ down, they’re drilling through gray clay.  Hopefully once they are through the impervious clay layer they’ll find another aquifer for us.  The gray clay is fantastic because it’s impermeable and any bacteria that could come from the surface (like doggie-do) can’t pass through that layer. Thus, (when) they do find an aquifer, the gray clay protects it – ta-da… a “confined aquifer” perfect for drinking (after treatment of course)!

A confined aquifer protected by an impermeable clay layer – hoping to find water in a few days here!

In King County, the Department of Ecology records all wells and actually has them mapped and available to the public for review on their website.  It’s a pretty easy map search to find all of the wells in your area.  In doing so, you can check out how deep you’d expect your well to be (and get an idea of the type of soils near your property).  Based on other well logs in the neighborhood (see below), I would expect to be around 350’ deep (or around there) to find our water.  Let’s hope it’s less, but only time will tell!

Four other private wells on our street show that we should hope to find water between 300′ and 400′ deep.

Our property is on a street that doesn’t have a water main from the local utility/water district.  So, that means that everyone has their own private well on their properties.  And since ours hasn’t been installed, that was one of the first orders of work (once preliminary grading was complete).

Johnson Drilling, the well driller arrived at the property on Wednesday and began to drill the well.  They can drill down about 60 feet per day (unless they hit rocks, then the rate/hour is reduced).  At a rate of $40 per foot, I’d like them to spend as little time at our place as they can!  Ultimately, they need to hit an aquifer with a good rate of water flow (gallons per minute) in order to pump enough water for our house.  We want to be above 10 gpm, and ideally more like 20 gpm.

Since the other homes in the neighborhood all have wells too, we’re able to review the well logs for their wells and see how deep those wells are.  Unfortunately they’re all over the map, ranging from 100’ deep to 450’ deep…so we have no idea where ours will end up.  At the end of the day Friday they still were drilling.  And apparently they must have hit some rocks because they’re only 60′ deep now.  Eeekkk.  One good thing is that at 60′ they did hit water, but only at a rate of 6 gpm.  We’ll see next week where they end up!  Drilling will pick back up on Tuesday.

Johnson Drilling arrived on site Wednesday to mobilize for the well drilling.

Check out the buckets they had…”Let’s Do This.” Love that!

Our well site is located at the tree line in the far northeast corner of the cleared area of our property.

Two trucks were there, one for drilling and the other for hauling the steel casing for the drill. I can’t believe they showed up with Kenworth’s…apparently they don’t know their clients very well 😉 With those vintage trucks, I think it’s time they invested in a couple new Mack’s!

Here’s the drill in action, which is located on the back end of the tan truck.

The turquoise truck hauled all of the casing pipe.

Those are some tight spaces they’re working in!