Well had a learning experience Saturday. My wife's family has a vacation house at the lake. Her father built the home and added on to it years ago. He always maintained it up until his Alzheimer's progressed. About six weeks ago my youngest BIL calls from the lake and says he can not get the water on. I say well there is water shutoff at the street that stays on and shutoff behind the house that we use every visit. We can not figure it out over the phone. His older brother and I drove down Saturday morning to fix. I got out of the truck and went and unlocked the house and garage. Came around the back of the house and he had raked the leaves back and the cover was off and he was testing the valve. :confused3: Guess we dig. Turned off water at the road and started digging. We dug a big hole, I mean a **** big hole, with a pick axe, cut out the valve and replaced with new material. "Man that is weird the valve is below the input to the house? We kinda joked about the installers. Turned on water and nada, nothing, zilch. The valve we cut out was bone dry and operational...seemed odd. Got the neighbors involved, lots of discussion, no help. Checked the crawl space. By this time we have half hour daylight left. Do we have a broken line somewhere? Weird that we do not have water showing up anywhere. My cohort decides to drill a hole in the water line between the two shut offs to check for water. We dig a hole out by the street and drill a hole and turn the valve. Water shoots up in the air. We shut the valve off and decide we will be digging a new water line in the spring. By this time it is dark so we start packing up. The pvc cover was cracked at the road so we decide to use the old one from behind the house because we dug and installed a larger access unit. I ask him what he did with it and he said he put it in the garage. I went to get it. I yell to him "Where is the metal one?" he says "What metal cover?" Oh %^$#@!*. So we go out back in the dark and find the actual shutoff buried under some gravel and leaves about 8 feet up the hill from the one we replaced. Dug a another big new hole out front and replaced the damage we did with the drill, in the dark. So we drove 450 miles, dug two holes in the rocky Ozarks, replaced what turned out to be a functioning system drainage valve with a sweet new large access hole, and repaired the water line at the street that we drilled a hole in. Practice makes perfect. 
