It rains where I live in the PNW. A lot.

So it will be completely unnecessary to dig a well. Although I have done this in the past.

We are currently hauling in most of our water.

The next step is to put gutters on the buildings and capture rainwater into barrels.

The next step after that is to put a water line from the creek up to the top of the property, and pump water up to a storage tank. This will give water pressure for your shower. There are a couple of snags. You need a pump and power for it down in the creek, and it's hundreds of feet away from the source of power at the cabin. (For a person who has been in the city living on a 50x100 foot lot in a residential house, things out in the puckerbrush are larger than you are used to. The property lines around this property are more than 1/4 mile.) So I need to run a power line down, drop a small pump in the creek, and pump water up. Or, I could put a small water wheel in the creek and generate a small amount of power there, and run the pump with that. It's too much elevation gain to run a hydraulic ram.

Small problem: I am trying to do everything with 12V. The problem is, with low voltage you get a lot of voltage drop on long power lines. So I might need to step it up to 120VAC with an inverter or even 240VAC. That's a problem for future me.

Next, you need to filter and purify your water.

I have what is called a "filter sock" which will remove anything larger than 5 microns. Then you basically add a small amount of bleach to kill any bacteria or pathogens. Since I have 55 gallon drums, the best way to do this is by the batch. I found some "pool shock" chlorine and did some math. A 55 gallon drum uses 0.4 teaspoons of powdered pool shock. A 5 pound box of pool shock will last for decades.

This is good enough for showering and washing dishes.

Then just for the hell of it, I will run the water through a Berkey filter before I drink it.

The County has a water testing service for people with well water. I should take a sample and send it in, and make sure I don't have any arsenic or weird stuff in my water.

Getting rid of waste water is pretty easy if you have hilly land. I don't want the expense of putting in a septic tank, etc. We won't be flushing a toilet or running a washing machine out here. Put in some perforated drain pipe above the garden and disperse the waste water there.