Did you know the house has three kinds of heat?

That's what the seller of our house turned to us and asked.

We responded with blank looks, so she elaborated: "It has the furnace, the wood stove, and the ceil heat."

Even that explanation didn't really help.  The furnace and wood stove were obvious, but ceil heat?  We had noticed some extra thermostats throughout the house, and a whole bunch of electrical breakers that went with them, but neither we nor our home inspector could figure out what they controlled.  We all surmised that they must have been for some electric baseboards or something of the sort that had been removed long ago.

So when the seller mentioned the ceil heat, we just smiled and nodded.  The poor woman had been legally blind for years.  Clearly her dear departed husband had been taking care of the home maintenance for years, and he had forgotten to tell her--or she had forgotten that she was told--that he had removed the system.

Really, I should know better.

A few months later, P was busy repairing the walls in the guest bedroom and my office, and decided that it was the perfect time to just remove the defunct thermostats and patch up the walls, while he was at it.  But just in case, he decided to do a little research first.

Ah, Google, friend of the older house renovator.  How else would we have learned that ceilheat was radiant electric heat with wiring embedded in the ceiling drywall?  Apparently it was briefly in vogue when our house was built.  In retrospect, it seems kind of obvious that ceilheat would have something to do with the ceiling, but trust me, that thought never crossed my mind before Google explained it to me.

And if you don't mind pausing for me to rant, can anyone think of a worse way to heat a house?  Heat rises--so if you start with a heat source at the ceiling, the top of your head will be nice and toasty, while your feet are still freezing.  Not to mention, I'm fairly certain that the attics of these houses were not insulated when they were first built.  (Or if they were, it was nothing compared to modern standards for insulation.)  So for every bit of heat that oozes into the room, at least as much is vanishing into the neighborhood.  Yeah.  Brilliant.

We turned it on, and sure enough, after all these years, it still works.  Then P discovered yet another maddening problem with the system: it means we have all sorts of live wires running through the ceiling.  And presumably, if you break the wire at any spot, the whole system will go out.  He has to get out our little proximity voltage tester (best tool ever if you live in a house with unpredictable wiring) anytime he wants to put so much as an extra screw into the ceiling.  The wires seem to be about six inches apart--can you imagine trying to install an extra light fixture?

Given our total contempt for the ceilheat system, P was all for pulling it out.  But I got cold feet, and insisted that it stay for the time being.  So we turned off all of the breakers (resistive heating uses a lot of juice--it's about 1/3 of our box!), and forgot about it for the next six months.

Over the summer we destructed another one of our heat sources, and removed our wood stove in the name of aesthetics and nine extra square feet in our dining room.

Stay tuned.  Next time, on SecretCityRanch: Learn more about our third heat source!

February 2011--month in review

The monthly check on our list of house goals.  We felt good about getting back into the swing of things, but the list still isn't looking so hot....

Guest Bedroom

• hang pictures
• reupholster antique chair still stuck 90% of the way there, waiting for the misplaced trim to magically appear
• install closet doors
• fix hinge-bound door so it will actually close

Office

• make and hang curtains still 50% done--I've ordered and received the fabric for the side windows, but haven't done anything with it
• reupholster footstool
• put laminate on top of craft table
• paint and hang door

Hall Bath

• skim coat walls a little more
• repaint walls
• really, really scrub grout--and if that doesn't remove yellowing, try one of those grout pens
• hang at least one picture/piece of art
• install closet door knob
• install hooks where I can hang my work clothes 
• install new light fixture

Hall/Living Room/Kitchen/Dining Room

• knock down walls to make these all a single space--started in on this job! 
• install structural beam to replace structural wall
• move electrical breaker box to exterior wall so we can knock down the interior wall it's currently on We have a new layout plan that will avoid needing to do this job.  P is still considering doing some major electrical work to bring our older house up to modern codes and best practices.
• patch existing oak flooring where walls were removed
• make new attic hatch
• replace textured ceiling in kitchen
• remove wood panelling and replace with drywall
• remove vinyl floor in kitchen, and lay new hardwoods there and over exposed subfloor in dining room
• commit to new kitchen plans
• build new kitchen cabinets (at least the lower ones)
• get/make new countertops
• install backsplash
• run plumbing for new sink and gas range Our new layout leaves the sink where it was, so that eliminates the need for this job, but adds:
• install new sink
• remove windows in dining room, and replace with french doors out to backyard
• buy fireplace screen and make the occasional fire    

• replace hearth tile
• make living room curtains (purely ornamental)
• figure out window treatment for front windows that will maximize both light and privacy (plantation shutters?)
• install new baseboard and crown molding
• install doors on coat closet
• fix draft under front door
• install lots of new outlets to bring house up to newer codes for required number of outlets per room
• install new lighting

Utility room

• build utility room
• buy and install new tankless water heater
• run plumbing and install utility sink
• run plumbing and vent lines for new washer/dryer location (due to new layout)

Master bedroom

• lay hardwood flooring over exposed subfloor

Master Bath

•  give ugly medicine cabinet a cosmetic face lift

  Crawl Space 

• complete encapsulation 98% of the way there....
• test house for radon
• enjoy running lots of plumbing and wiring for new kitchen/utility room/great room in new, dry, clean space

Garage

•  fix roof leaks most of the way there--we finally got enough rain to test January's repairs--most of the leaks are fixed, and just one slow one remains
• continue to work to make this a functional wood shop for P (so he can spend lots of time out there building me new kitchen cabinets!)

Exterior

• paint foundation to complement new stair color
• figure out how to make exterior brick look good after we cut into it to install afore-mentioned french doors
• paint front door a more lively color (it should be easy to beat white)
• work with P's brother A, a professional landscape designer, to come up with an actual design for our landscape
• remove a few more azaleas
• add more plants and beds to continue moving toward cottage garden look well, I spent a lot of time drooling on seed catalogs and dreaming the impossible dream...
• grow a tomato that doesn't rot before it ripens
• try to agree on privacy plantings for west property line, and plant them so they have some time to grow
• buy and plant Yaupon hollies on east property line

There's a lot left to do here--and I think we've added more items off the list than we've crossed off! 

Let there be light!

So what possessed us to rip down an entire wall of drywall last weekend?

Primarily, we're aiming for a more open floor plan.  It suits the way we live, and we think most people these days like them--we're hopeful with it will a real asset someday when we sell the house. 

There was one other big idea behind the project: light.

Both P and I would consider ourselves "solar powered."  We're a lot more productive in the summer than the winter, and we never really feel properly awake on a dark, overcast day.  Natural light was one of the most important factors was considered in the home buying process: e.g., the number, size, and orientation of windows.

Our house scored better than average in the light department, but we're still aiming for better. 

Our dining room in the morning.  It has two west windows--but the wall of the house blocks their southwest side.  So it has decent light in mid- to late-afternoon, and is fairly dark in the morning.

Here it is in the morning:

Just to illustrate a point here, I took this picture with the camera settings on manual, and then walked into the living room, and didn't adjust any settings.  Here's what the living room looks like in the morning (complete with the clutter we cleared out last weekend):

Gotta love three south windows!  And did I mention--the blinds were fully closed when I took that picture.  Those windows pretty much sold us on the house purchase.

Now that the wall is down, all that light floods into the dining room.  I still give a happy sigh every time I see it. 

Just for kicks, I then took the camera into the kitchen--which only has east-facing windows and an east skylight, so it's at its brightest in the morning.  Ready?

We have some major plans on how to fix that problem.  Stay tuned....

Back in the saddle

I'm not sure whether it was:

1. the near completion of the eternal crawl space project that had kept P fully occupied for months;
2. the longer days and unseasonably warm weather that woke us from our winter hibernation;
3. weather that reminded us of when we first moved in last year, and we waist-deep in construction projects; or
4. simply too long since we had last started a new project.

Whatever it was, we snapped out of it this past weekend!

I was just browsing the blog archive, and realized that we've said almost nothing about our living room so far.  Here's what we did with the room in 2010:

April: pulled up old carpet, swept up old carpet pad that had decayed into dust, pulled off old baseboards, removed ugly and stubbornly attached window valence, and refinished the floors.

May: put protective covering down on floors and moved everything from our storage locker into here.  Unpacked some stuff.

June-January 2011: continued to use living room as storage locker for stuff we didn't know what to do with.

What an embarrassment.

Saturday we tackled the mess.  There was some recycling, some uncluttering (Goodwill pile, etc.), and some moving of furniture that actually belongs in the living room to the guest room (plus some stubborn boxes that are continuing to resist unpacking/uncluttering).

Drumroll, please: Ladies and Gentlemen, for the first time on this blog (sans carpet), I present...our living room!

We momentarily admired our handiwork in the floor refinishing, and then Sunday we covered the floors back up.  Fully, this time.  And with duct tape.

So we could get to the fun part:

P wanted to be sure I documented the last paint color of the dining room before the paneling was installed

P had to work on Monday, but I had the day off to clean up and admire our handiwork:

Eventually we will remove the studs too--but for now, they're the structural wall holding up about a third of our roof.  Mr. Resident Engineer has some work to do before they can go anywhere.

Man, it felt good to get back into the swing of construction.

Quilt blocks

I've been getting a lot of quilting done this winter since our larger home renovation projects have generally stalled.  (Okay, that's not really true--what's happened is that P has spent three months rehabbing the crawl space.  I refused to help with that job but can't really move forward on any of the upstairs projects without his help, so things are sort of stalled with the interior.)

I showed you the quilted table runner I made to dress our dining room up for Christmas--and then I made four more to gift to family members.  I've completed two queen size quilt tops in the last month.  Hopefully I can get some good progress made on quilting them over the upcoming holiday weekend.  No previews--they're both surprise gifts, so I'd like to receipients to see them before the blog does.

This past weekend was the meeting of our local Modern Quilt Guild.  We take turns doing a block of the month--one person hands out fabric and a pattern, and each guild member brings back the assembled block the following month.

Or the next month they're there, if they have as poor an attendance record as I do.  Case in point, here is the November block I made and returned in February.

February was my month to present the block.  I went with the Rectangle Squared block by Film in the Fridge--though per my usual trend, I made the measurements about 25% larger than the pattern called for.  Larger blocks not only come together faster, but I like the less busy look they give a quilt.  I'm looking forward to getting all of the blocks back and assembling them!