cold, then rainy, and some other stuff

Sorry about the delay! We’re still getting setup from the move and the projects have lost some of the clearly defined stop+start of the earlier stuff.

Fireplace sucking heat RIGHT NOW.

Up a chimney with no flue.

Leaky roof, pigeon home.

As compared to this.

Cold

Week before last it broke really cold around here. There was at least one night below freezing, or at least there was frost on my car. The cold helped us discover where the house is not very efficient, which is just about everywhere. Part of what we discovered is that chimneys have no flues — the chimneys are just big tubes carrying our warm air out of the house.

The cast iron on the fireplace look like a door or cover should be able to attach, so we decided to hunt down some of these. Our first stop was Caravati’s, but they didn’t have anything in stock and had a bit of an attitude. They did give a name of a place that might have the covers, though. The sent us to Governor’s Antiques in Mechanicsville, which turned out to be a wonderful place, even if they didn’t have what we were looking for. The guy there told us that the cast iron covers were the type of thing that got melted down during WWII and are thus rare and expensive these days (not what you want to hear in a house w/ 6 fireplaces…). He suggested that we could cover the the hole with some pressed tin and that it might look ok. So we bought some of the tin that he had for sale and have another project to get to real soon. Governor’s had all sorts of old house parts and new statues and tables and just stuff — if you are ever in the area and have some hours to kill you should really stop by and poke around.

Then Rainy

The BIG excitement of the week is that the roofers have finally come. They were here two days scraping and patching and painting the tin roof this week before the rain came. The black roof is now silver and is theoretically water proof. The problem is that the roof isn’t actually waterproof — 3″ of rain came today and we found there are several vigorous new leaks and that the old ones are still there. This is somewhat demoralizing. The roofers should be back on Monday to start to repair the rotted soffet and fix the new and old leaky parts of the roof. I just want it to stop leaking; Ronni is excited that the pigeons won’t be living in our house anymore.

Make Yard Pretty, Sort Of

From day one, the southeast corner of the front yard has been overwhelmed by an ancient and giant honeysuckle. One of the warm days after the city cleaned the yard next door we decided to see what we could do to our little piece of the jungle. We also hacked at the giant whatever bush that was by the front steps. The result is astounding — the front of the yard is much cleaner and we don’t feel so blocked off.

Besides getting our yard less wild, the cleansing also produced an immense amount of stuff to get rid of. We found the ‘free dump’ that Carter had told us about and in about 10 trips cleared away all of the brush and the last remaining disgusting appliance and random inherited air-conditioner. during all of this, the little pickup truck has really come into it’s own and has started feeling like a real member of our automotive family…

Also

Simply - we now have curtains for our bedroom. This is going to be real nice. Yes it was difficult to find curtains for 76″ windows.

We’re getting quotes on getting the electrical box upgraded and some security lights put in. More on that this next time…