Holiday Season

It's been slow here in terms of house repairs as we get the place decorated for Christmas. And there's no better way to decorate than with 20'' of snow:

And so we got our first chance to experience a snowstorm as homeowners which meant SHOVELING. Wooo! (I'm sure it will get old pretty quickly, but for now since it was the first snowfall of the year, it wasn't so bad.)

(The picture is quite deceptive. D did most of the shoveling the evening before just after the snow fell. I, a weakling, was not very efficient and so mostly just watched).

And so combined despite our sparse Christmas lights, I think we have a very festive scene:

And a close-up of my little village scene, which I've had since I was a child and which now has a perfect home in our picture window:

Finally, some pictures of the inside, decorated for the holidays. I realized that I never put a picture of the living room in its finished, pre-decorated state, so here are some "before" pictures:

(That's an Ikea Expedit in the doorway to create some separation between the entry and the living room.)

And now here are some photos from after we decorated:

It's going to be a merry Christmas, especially once we get the fire lit and sit around sipping hot chocolate. Home repairs and painting will have to wait until next year.

More Winterizing

Last weekend, we decided that it was time to explore the crawl space in our basement and check out the status of our pipes. Usually, our crawl space looks like this:

(see that tiny door behind all those bikes? yep, that's the crawl space)

It's easy to understand why we forget it's there. But it is, and many of our heat pipes head in that direction. D was brave and went in (I mostly watched from the safety of the cement) and measured all our pipes. We were a little surprised to find that they were all completely uninsulated. We didn't know that, since actually the crawl space was blocked during our inspection, so we never got in there before we bought the house.

So we were off to Home Depot for another big purchase. Buying insulation turned out to be harder than we though. First, the measurements are for the inside of the pipe, which isn't how we measured, obviously. We just had to estimate the exterior diameter best we could. Since insulation is supposed to fit snugly, poor D had to go back to Home Depot twice more to finish all our repurchasing and returns until we got it right. Second, there's a lot of kinds of insulation. We bought foam ones for the small pipes and fiberglass ones for the bigger pipes. Somehow, I got fiberglass particles on my exposed skin (hands and collarbone) and started turning bright red and itching on our first trip for insulation. I had to rush home and shower. That's why D didn't trust me to go back again and went the second and third time by himself.

Then it was insulation time:

After those little particles got all over me, I really took the warnings about breathing in particulate seriously and made D put on a mask. Isn't he cute?

So now our pipes are insulated. Unfortunately, the guest room and office are still much colder than the main rooms of the house. The heaters are lukewarm to the touch, so we know that water is flowing through and we don't have to bleed the system any more. It seems that even with the insulation, traveling under the house makes the hot water cooler. I think this will just be a fact we have to live with, at least without having to make major renovations.

We are investing in a good electric blanket...