A Tale of Two Mamas
Trying to keep someone IN timeout
Archive for House Woes
November 29, 2007 at 12:48 pm · Filed under House Woes
When we first moved into our house I was shocked at the lack of ceiling lighting that we had throughout the house.
Every house or apartment that I had ever lived in had at least one ceiling light above! With our house we have two rooms that have no ceiling lights so we have to be creative with floor lamps and table lamps.
I go back and forth whether or not to add more lighting because I fear that it might make our small living room look even smaller. Plus, the ceiling upstairs that is pretty short…will be even shorter if we add lighting on the ceiling!
November 29, 2007 at 7:42 am · Filed under House Woes
Actually, we’ve had heat since Monday…but they’re still not quite done. I’ve been splurging and turning the thermostat up to 68 or even 70–which, those of you who know me, is unheard of! 61 used to be my limit.
We got the Carrier Infinity 96 which is a 96% AFUE, meaning I can claim a measly $150 credit on my taxes this year. But, it’s extremely quiet, and keeps the house pretty warm in spite of not being fully installed. The guys have yet to finish the ductwork, including connecting the actual return to the furnace and the humidifier. I am very excited about the humidifier–once this is done, we can hopefully do away with two space heaters and one vaporizer.
The Sears installer–not so impressed. We insisted that this be done before Thanksgiving, and I think everyone’s just finished the last of their turkey leftovers. He didn’t show up the first Monday until 9:45 (which for most contractors is practically afternoon); Tuesday he got a flat on his trailer; Wednesday we were out of town; ; this Monday he arrived at 10:30 and left at 2:30, in spite of a one hour lunch; Wednesday he arrived at 10:30 and left at 2:30 because he “felt sick”; and Friday he’s supposed to finish the job. This was supposed to be a 2-day job! And the damn fool is losing money in gas I imagine–it’s at least 3 gallons each way from the town he’s coming from.
Hopefully it will all be done on Friday and I can finally clean the house and basement.
November 25, 2007 at 11:58 am · Filed under House Woes
We got in late last night to find that our house had dropped down to 43 degrees over the holidays! We had to take superfast showers and RUN upstairs, only to find that the two heaters we had running upstairs blew the circuit breaker. After moving one heater to another circuit, it still took a couple of hours for it to warm up.
We’re in the living room right now, huddled around one of the heaters we brought down. At least it’s gone up to 64 (supposedly) in here… but we can still see Grammy’s breath when she exhales!
November 13, 2007 at 1:29 pm · Filed under House Woes, PP
So, it’s no secret that if we had more money we would probably be interested in building a new house, on some land, that had a great school district.
Of course, we have the local contractors that can build houses and the manufactured homes. One of our friends has a log cabin home and it’s really a great place. It’s set in the woods and is perfect! I’m not sure if she went through Log Cabin House Plans or if the house was already built when she purchased it.
If we were interested in building I think we’d look more towards English Cottage House Plans. We like the style and if we could make it quite a bit bigger than our existing house and add a family room and a few more bathrooms then it’d be just perfect.
Given that we have a baby on the way I’d love to have more space. The reality is when we start to get out the playpen, swing, highchair, and other baby accessories - our house gets small pretty fast!
HousePlansAndMore.com offers some great house plans from Small Ranch House Plans to huge colonial style houses.
November 11, 2007 at 8:34 am · Filed under House Woes
In our kitchen, that is. We are dawning on week #3 without a furnace, and it’s frosty outside. We’ve been surviving with space heaters and sequestering ourselves in certain rooms. We don’t dare step into the downstairs bedrooms!
As you may or may not know, when our plumber/heating guy came out a couple of weeks ago to do the routine furnace maintenance, he informed us that we had two cracked exchangers and that we had better not use the heat lest we release carbon monoxide into the house! Shawna quickly went out and bought a CO detector, which thankfully came back negative. We should have had one all along, just like the smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.
She’s spent the subsequent weeks interviewing and obtaining quotes from various heating contractors, all peddling Trane, Carrier or Gibson. We’d never heard of Gibson, so we dismissed those. Our last quote was from Sears, who I was most skeptical about, given what I’d read online about poor customer service, unavailability, etc.–the usual expectations from national corporate behemoths.
I spent the better part of travel to and from our OB appointment reviewing costs and installation details with the Sears sales rep. I had initially thought that the best alternative for heating the upstairs was to create a second zone–it seemed like the climate differential between our two stories was tremendous, and it only made sense. Not one rep who came to our house could find the ductwork that isolates our upstairs, so they all deemed it impossible. Finally, frustrated at not understanding why they all pooh-poohed zoning, I talked to the Sears guy. I told him where the ductwork was for the upstairs, and he was dumbfounded–partially at the fact that he couldn’t find it, perhaps more that I could.
Anyway, we talked through it and he convinced me that zoning was not the best alternative–it would be expensive, and the main problem with the ductwork upstairs was that it is undersized (as most of it is in our house). He wanted to get a new line up to the second floor, but had no idea how. I told him that we could mirror the ductwork from the back side of the house: we have a 4″ line that runs vertically inside our bathroom closet, up into the upstairs crawlspace, and out through two vents into our bedroom and hallway respectively. Over the phone, I walked him through measuring the lateral distance of the ductwork from the exterior bathroom wall, and transferring that measurement to the front of the house, and into the front living room closet. We found that it would work, and decided that we would do that rather than zoning.
While we were in our OB appointment, he reworked the numbers. One thing we both didn’t like was the pressure he put on us to agree to the work that day, in spite of the fact that we had 3 days to cancel. Shawna and I fought over it for a little while–Sears was the cheapest estimate, but I wanted to go with someone local and responsive. Well, she won and so far we’ve saved about $900. We’ll see how it all turns out, and give an update. The final bill: $5400 for a Carrier 96 Infinity, upgrading of all our 4″ ducts to 6″, a humidifier, and one new duct upstairs.
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