We have water...sort of.

The water lines here at the campground are still frozen. Despite the fact that we had a gorgeous sunny day yesterday with a high of 18C (65F). But even with weather like that, we're expecting it will be at least another week before the lines are thawed out.

But, we need to be able to flush the toilet!

So one of the guys brought a 250 gallon tank over and we set it up outside. Then we ran the emergency firehose all the way down to the lake, drilled a hole in the ice (yes, it's still about 3 feet thick!), and pumped the tank full of lake water! Then we hooked the tank to the house pump.

All sounds very simple, but this exercise took us a few hours!

That's my work truck for the summer! And there's our temporary water tank in the back.

The tank set up and full of lake water.

So now we have running water in "the cabin". Our brand new toilet flushes just fine, and the hot water heater seems to be working too. The fridge is working with no problem. Still a couple of things to be done in the appliance department though. We found out that the oven isn't working. And there's some kind of electric problem with the ceiling light in the living room. Oh well, need something to do to  keep busy!

While the other two fellows were installing the toilet and hooking up the water, I kept busy in the "basement" while Ruth was working on organizing the house.

The "basement" is really just a crawl space. And it's only about four and a half feet tall so it's a little cramped trying to do anything down there. But over the years, they've used it as a kind of a storage space for anything else that didn't have a place of it's own at the campground. It was so full of crap that you couldn't move around down there. And a lot of it was just garbage. 

So around 8:30am yesterday morning I started dragging everything outside so I could sort out what's useful and what's not. And so that I knew what there actually was down there.

The "I think it's worth keeping" pile.

The "this is going in the trash" pile.

Not done yet. This is after I've already removed the stuff in the two pictures above!

Yes, those are expensive RV toilets in the background. Yes, there's a story behind them. Maybe we'll get to that another day.

So it was a good first day. Nice to be getting back into doing a little more physical stuff, although it might take a week or two for the muscles to get used to it! Ruth has got the interior of "the cabin" pretty much organized, so maybe we'll show you some pictures of that tomorrow.

Two of the board members, Derwin and Leah, invited us over to their place last night for a game of cards. Had fun playing Kaiser...similar to Euchre.

I'll be surprised if this is thawed out by the May long weekend three weeks from now!