As if putting on an addition wasn't enough to have going on...

If you have a well, go down into your basement or whatever dungeon your house has. Find your pressure tank. You probably know what it is—a cylindrical metal tank, maybe a couple feet in diameter, maybe waist or chest high, with a bunch of plumbing coming out the bottom. One end of the plumbing comes out of the floor from your well; the other end goes to your water softener or water heater maybe, and somewhere on the plumbing near the tank is at least one pressure gauge, a spigot, a small plastic box with wires coming out of it, and some other stuff. Did you find it? Good.

Now take it out and put in a new one.

Be sure to switch off the circuit breakers to the well so you don't electrocute yourself, and shut off all the water valves so you don't have water gushing all over. Better have $300 to $600 in your pocket, too. That'll cover the new tank—and the new plumbing, because the new tank won't be exactly the same size as your old one, and you'll need to rearrange the pipes a bit. Of course that's a Big Oversimplification. For one thing, the old tank is probably full of water, which is heavy. And wet. The space where you have to work is probably dark and crowded. When they built the house, one of the first things to go in was that tank, and everything else got installed in front of it. You do have two pipe wrenches, don't you? You can't do this with only one.

Well, I'm proud of myself. Friday our neighbor, Martin, the best neighbor in the world, noticed that our well pump was cycling too often, and a few tests revealed that the bladder inside our tank had failed. (Pressure tanks have a rubber membrane to separate the water from the air that provides your water pressure; otherwise the air would dissolve into the water and in a few weeks you wouldn't have any air to make pressure with.) Our tank had filled with water and the broken bladder was interfering with the water flow. The repeated cycling was destroying our 22-year old well pump, no doubt buried several hundred feet into solid bedrock. Time to retire old Blue.
The project took me seven hours, not counting the trip to Tractor Supply for the tank, but counting two trips to Home Depot for parts (one unplanned). No leaks and it works perfectly! Here's a pic. You can just see the pipe from the well on the far right. The white plastic includes a sediment filter (gift from Martin several months ago). On the far left edge are the washer and dryer. Martin and I stacked them (permanently) to make the dryer easier to use and so we could get to the pressure tank.

My wife says the dishwasher sounds funny.