header-photo

It was Fancy Friday When I started this...

Welcome to another Fancy Friday. Normally at this time of the week, Mike and I would be gearing up for a rough and tumble weekend of work around the house.

But not this weekend.

Shocked? Well, I'll tell you what's going on. We finished the chimney last weekend. I raked leaves. Our carpenter extrodinaire TJ put in our new kitchen window. It was fairly productive.

But in light of the upcoming holiday and fast growing Home Depot credit card balance, Mike and I are taking a well deserved and neccessary break from home repair in order to catch up on our other other hobby - vehicles!!!

You see, last year round holiday time, Mike's '96 Tacoma ran into problems. Rather then fix it, we just stuffed it into the garage and bought a full size Dodge. (Cause you know we have the slide-in camper and the trailer and all - plus having a Dodge diesel is pretty fuel efficient for a full size truck - anyway - this is a tangent.)

So.... in order to pay off debt and have some money for the holidays and hopefully some for my beloved '78 trans am, which was so ruthlessly kicked out of the garage when the truck went in. (She needs two new doors, both inner fenders, a full weatherstrip kit, and one fender, plus motor mounts and a crud load of small niceities. Tangent 2. On a roll.... with cheese.) For these reasons and more, we need to fix the Toyota.

With a four day Thanksgiving weekend on the horizon, timing couldn't be any more perfect. So, we'll be spending our vaca in the garage. And hopefully, by monday, the truck will be for sale on our front lawn.

Ever so Toasty, There's Nothing Like Heat

So over last friday and saturday, as I prepared for our annual post-halloween bash, mike set himself to the psychotic task of making the heat work. 

The chimney is not totally finished, but it was high enough to be considered safe. So Mike installed two new baseboards upstairs for the second zone and finished plumbing in the basement.

Upon first pressurizing the system, everything seemed okay - no leaks. Then, just a few hours before the party, as Mike fired up the furnace for the first time, a few leaks appeared in the basement. We had to call over our plumber friend Brian to bail us out, for which I am ever so grateful.

We got it working and the party was a success.

However, now we're having some detail issues. The thermostat seems to be hooked up backwards - the heat is hooked in to the AC. Which means, the thermostat thinks that the heat is air conditioning.... a slight problem.

Plus - we don't have the second zone thermostat hooked up yet, so the upstairs keeps getting super hot. Hopefully we'll be able to get these problems resolved soon and then take a breather for the holidays. 

My home depot account needs to recover a little!!!