Well, after living for weeks in a construction zone (and working in it
too) we're finally cleaning up! It is so nice to see the floors again
and to able to not worry about wet paint on your feet when going to
the restroom! Just in time for Mom & Dad to arrive, and make the house
look reasonable again..
Now that we've unearthed the computer I'll be able to easily post
photos sometime..
Debbie found the coolest thing the other day... Here in Portland (and
some of the surrounding PG&E service areas I guess) you can get a free
energy audit for your house by the Energy Trust. This basically
entails a person coming to your house and doing some inspection on the
insulation, furnace, water heater, crawl spaces, and water flow at
each tap. Then they recommend what types of energy efficiency
improvements would be most worthwhile and cost effective for your home
AND they offer cash incentives for making the improvements. On our
home I can get a total of $650 in incentives for the work we were
planning on doing anyway (blowing in insulation and sealing air
leaks). (You have to have them inspect BEFORE you make changes,
otherwise you don't qualify for the incentives.)
They also offered to install 10 compact fluorescent bulbs, low-flow
aerators on all your faucets, and replace your shower heads with
(rather nice) low flow shower heads. (We decided to install the bulbs
ourselves, so they just left us a nice pile of them on the table.)
You just call them to set up a 1 - 1.5 hour appointment: 1-866-ENTRUST
https://www.energytrust.org/residential/hes/index.html
Can't beat the price! Especially with energy costs going up right now
it's a good time to think about it.
Well, updating the blog has fallen behind some other priorities lately
- home projects have taken over! I have some pictures on the digital
camera but the computer is completely covered in tarps so I can't
upload them yet. We're trying to redo the walls in the downstairs
office, bedroom, and hallway simultaneously which makes pretty much
the whole house a staging area for the painting process. We already
had all the wallpaper off which was a lot of work but I had no idea
there was so much work involved in painting (and plastering)! Whew!
With my parents visiting for Halloween this year we've got a nice
deadline to finish the existing projects for.. we're looking forward
to their visit and being done with the rooms!
This past weekend was particularly productive, I tore out a bad
looking patch in the plaster ceiling of the downstairs bedroom and
created a reasonably sized project for myself. I filled it with this
plaster patch material that has a working time of ~5 minutes (and it's
hard to do anything in 5 minutes..) so I had to keep sanding it like
crazy to make it flat. But the material clogged up my sandpaper almost
instantly.. so I went and bought "special" sandpaper too. After many
hours of standing on a ladder sanding the ceiling it looks pretty good
and is ready for the texture to finish it up before we paint. Debbie
managed to paint all the trim in the hallway (lots of doors, cabinets,
stairways...) and we put a layer of plaster on the office. The house
is a disaster area, dust everywhere and tarps down over the whole back
of the house, a large portion of the rest of the house basement
included is used as a staging area for the various paint and plaster
products around.
Hopefully we will be done with the office tonight (!!) so at least we
can use the computer again and find the checkbooks. Despite all that I
managed to start a batch of hard cider fermenting yesterday!