For 20 years, my wife and I have vacationed with our kids at the same rented cottage on a small, quiet lake in northern Wisconsin. On every week-long visit we’ve taken a ritual boat ride around the lake, looking at the cottages and lots for sale.
Two summers ago, a nice wooded lot came on the market, directly across the lake from our cabin. Last summer it was still for sale and, being farther on in life and having a few dollars saved, we were tempted.
On the last day of our vacation, I took the boat over to that side of the lake to fish along a bed of pencil reeds. The reed bed ended right in front of the available lot.
As I shut off the outboard and used the trolling motor to get within casting range of the reeds, I said to myself: “If I catch a fish in front of the For Sale sign, we are destined to buy this land.”
Well, on the first cast with a floating jointed minnow plug, bingo: a 19-inch, 4-pound largemouth bass. To make a long story short, that turned out to be one expensive fish (which, knowing what I do now, maybe I should have kept and eaten).
New perspective
All that is by way of saying that in the fairly near future I will be hiring someone to install a septic system. I’m sure the experience will help me understand this business better, and from a different point of view.
The lot we bought already had a soil evaluation and approval for a conventional system. As it turned out, the Oneida County inspector with whom I walked the property before the sale, Curt Bloss, had read Onsite Installer. And he was a little surprised to meet someone who knew the purpose of the test holes that had been dug in three places on the property.
Thanks to what I have learned from this job — and from installers like you — I am better prepared than the average person to embark on a well-and-septic project. I’m also facing the reality of owning and maintaining a system instead of just writing about it.
When you live in town (as we do) and have sanitary sewer service, it’s easy to preach about how new homeowners should approach an onsite project and how installers ought to deal with customers. Now I have to back up the preaching — literally put my money where my mouth is in buying a system and appurtenances.
Decisions coming
There will be installers to interview, bids to get, decisions to make on things like effluent filters, risers, tank sizes, materials, drainfield sizing, location of the system on the parcel, and more. It will be interesting to deal with installers from a completely different perspective than I’m used to. I know there are a number of excellent professionals in that area, and I look forward to meeting them.
In the end, I can’t help but learn from the experience to come. I’ll probably spend more time than most people would observing the installation — seeing from start to finish just how it all happens. Yes, I’ve seen installations before, but I’ve watched with a degree of professional detachment. This time it will be my money going into the ground, my impact on the environment, my system to care for.
It’s not as if I’ll be installing anything exotic — it looks like a basic “box and rocks” situation. But I’ll share the experience with readers to the extent it seems of interest. What I’m most curious about is how the process will change the way I look at my role as editor of this magazine.
So, onward. Whatever may happen, at least I can rest assured that fish I catch from now on will be a lot less costly than last summer’s reed bed largemouth.
