What the well.

So yesterday I was working from home- away from internet and distractions so I could get some important work done when I heard knocking on my front door and the bell ringing--which never happens...

Flash back to June right after we moved in: JD was mowing our front lawn and he told me that he fell leg deep into a sink hole that we thought could be from where a tree had been uprooted or something.

I went outside to see who I had missed and met Mo and Steve (very cool excavating brothers in town) and also our neighbors who own the home next to us. That sink hole had sunk a lot more and you could see a hole that went down and down. Something needed to be done and it was actually right between both our properties. The town had been by to indeed tell us it was our problem--dang. We were the proud owners of a big hole that needed to be filled. Our other neighbor had helped "fill it" several times and it just keeps sinking so we needed to fill it with stones this time to stop the erosion.
I mean, sinking money into a home is hard enough, but this was a real sink. Mo and Steve brought their excavator and dump truck up and began digging. Our neighbor (who had looked at the town records of our street) saw that it was a well and knew there was a massive well stone cover that Steve lifted up and uncovered a perfectly preserved stone well. I don't actually know how old it is (will find that out) but at least 100 years old we are thinking. The well stone had a small hole drilled in it so we are thinking it was used to pump water out perhaps.

As we were lifting the stone I called one and all (we have a very cool little neighborhood) around to check it out. I was just thinking about the 20 ft. stone well I didn't know that I owned half of. Some guys from the town came to check it out and we joked about keeping it and making it into Windsor's Wishing Well. But Mo went off and got some stone fill in his smaller truck and it didn't even make a dent in the hole so he took their huge dump truck and 10 yards of fill later (about 2000 gallons and 7500 liters), the hole was plugged. The area around the well has been eroding so the whole thing just needed to be filled but it is still there, just filled with tiny pebbles. So if we ever want to dig it out, we can pail by pail.


My Nephew, lil M, was totally into watching and helping direct the whole thing. A future foreman or air traffic control man perhaps? Look at his face while the truck was dumping--simple joys eh?

After it was filled they asked me what I wanted to do and I must say, that when I woke up I hadn't thought that I would need to be making landscaping decisions (as I don't even have furniture or curtains--landscaping is waaaaay down on the list) and just finding the old well was seemingly enough so I just let them work their magic and come up with this--so we can show off the well stone.
So what that it looks very similar to a grave stone and a small cemetery. Our house already stands out on the street, I didn't really think adding a small cemetary would be a big deal. It is just the beginning of my abstract sculpture garden. Sure, I have noticed people walking by and staring but perhaps we can turn it into some sort of attraction. One idea was to say that it is a NZ custom and we have brought back Mike's ancestoral remains to bury. Any others? Here are some pix of the crew (our neighbors who half one the cemetary, Mo and Steve, JD, and Max being upside down)

Sadly, all of this happened and was done while Mike was on his flight from Phoenix to Philidelphia--he would loved it actually. Pretty random day.