So, I haven’t posted about the house in a while, my bad.

We’ve been not doing a whole lot as it’s winter enough to keep from, say, painting, which we have a lot of to do. We finished framing in the bedroom window, and now can’t find the cordless drill power cord (heh) to install the shade in the window. *rolls eyes* it’s been like that a lot lately.

BUT! We have a wood-burning stove installed and it’s AWESOME!

The house isn’t really set up well for wood heat – it’s probably why there’s a chimney at both ends – being a long rectangle, more or less:

[card][bedrm[bath][kitcn]{util]
[Living][dining][kitchen][util]
[llllll][ddddddd]

(yay houseplan. There’s stairs in the dining room)

And the wood stove is in the Living room, on an awesome granite-tile pad Spouse!Man built.
So the Living Room is TOASTY, the dining room is nice, and the kitchen is a bit chill during the day.

We burn the stove from ~11 to ~11, then let the boiler take care of the night time into early morning. but the cool part is (to me) what we’re burning: deadwood from the yard, grapevines from the yard, a little semi-green stuff we cut out of the yard (yes, we’ll have the chimney thoroughly swept come spring), and 1/3 of a very old barn we freecycled and had delivered to us.

Yes. We have 1/3 of a barn (more like 1/6 now) in our garage. And it burns beautifully.

I <3 freecycle so hardcore.

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Forget “jobless recovery;”
The dead brown grass and
stick-figure tress speak to me
of a seasonless winter.

It’s raining today. I’d say this was our normal January thaw, except there’s been nothing TO thaw.

That being said!

We got 3/4 of the bedroom window moulding installed last night. I’m a bit wussy with both a hammer & a saw, but I imagine that will change with time. It’s nice to see things beginning to come together, finally.

Only 3/4, however, because the fourth part of the moulding, well, the casing doesn’t quite fit and the window space isn’t quite big enough for the moulding, so we have to wait for the mud to dry before we install the moulding on top of it.

While I was in Rochester this weekend, my wonder-spouse built a hearth board for our wood stove. Now all we need is some chimney!!

(And there were cookies. Cookies are always good.)

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Monday night, as we were about to go to bed, T. wandered outside.

“What’s going on?” thought I to myself.

“Whatcha doing?” asked I.

“Checking the heating oil levels,” quoth he.

“Why’s that?”

“The boiler isn’t burning.”

Brr!

We made the executive decision, after reading up online, to call the boiler repair people to come in the morning, rather than pay for the emergency service. After all, we’ve lived with furnaces that shut off randomly before.

Our house loses ~1 degree F an hour. So the morning was cold but not unbearable (57F, down from our normal 68F)

When the repair guy came… turned out that our oil had gelled. *Facepalm* So… cost us the cost of a visit from him, and that’s it. And, luckily, we got our oil/kerosene delivered yesterday, so we have a higher kerosene mix in the tank now.

Yay, adventures in home-ownership!

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Guys, I’m SO EXCITED!

As we speak, the plumbers are either on the way to or at my place, fixing the baseboard heaters, the shower, and the sink that needs to be removed.

THIS MEANS that we can get the carpet installed!!

It also means that we need to get off our butts and do everything else for the bedroom, namely:

• Finish painting all the trim
  
• Case and trim the window. Trim the door.
  
• Sand the door & contemplate painting it
  
• Figure out how to do the closet
  
• Cut and stain the closet pieces
  
• install the closet

Guess what I’m doing for the next two weeks!

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Woosh! I have paint everywhere!

This weekend, I finally got out the paint sprayer and started painting the bedroom.

This thing takes a little more getting used to than I’d hoped, but it seems to work very nicely. Next time? Wearing a face mask.

We also: trimmed the lilac making horror-movie noises against the gutter, cut apart an old, broken kids’ pool, T. planted some garlic, I painted some window trim, and bought cider without, for the first time this year, getting lost.

Oh, and made butternut-bread-casserole for dinner. Om nom nom nom!

Painting the bedroom makes me feel like we’re moving along somewhere on this thing. T’s gotten a lot done – this weekend he also cleaned up the pantry/basement stairwell quite a bit, pulling out 2 dozen old canning jars, too, from the crawl space, and over the week he discovered that our dining room is painted over old wallpaper (ack).

All in all, a very nice weekend.

How have you all been?

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