This Damned Old House
So winter blew in yesterday, such as it is around these parts, with the temperature dropping to 27 at sunrise accompanied by a stiff north wind.
It gave us the first opportunity to try out our central heat, which was installed at the end of January 2005, when the worst of the cold weather was over.
Unfortunately, as usual, it becomes apparent more work is in order around here.
The furnace controlling the upstairs works just fine, and in fact hardly ever comes on because the warm air from downstairs drifts up the staircase.
But the downstairs, with those swell 10-foot ceilings and bare wood floors, is a drafty 63 degrees, tops. And that’s with a towel laid across the bottom of the front door.
At this temperature and with this wind, that’s the best the downstairs furnace unit can muster.
Which reinforces a few things we already knew:
→ The underside of this old 1913 house badly needs insulating
→ So do the walls, but that’s not going to happen because there’s no way to do it short of ripping out the plaster
→ The doors need to be weather-stripped
→ Most of the windows need to be replaced someday if we ever have the money, which is a laugh right now
→ We like sweaters.
It all beats last December, before the central heat and air system was installed, when the sole heat source was a 1930s gas-jet space heater about 30 inches tall and 36 inches wide. It kept you toasty warm if you were standing within 10 feet of it or sat in the stairwell. Otherwise things were pretty icy.
Luckily, no one has to take winter very seriously for very long around here; usually there are three or four cold snaps of three or four days apiece in which the weather drops into the 30s.
For instance, by Sunday it’ll be in the 60s again.
Meanwhile, I’ve been busy playing reporter again after a few years hiatus, and spending all my spare time trying to create charts to track basketball schedules and standings at every high school in the area. Why?
Because no other media outlet does, and that’s a gap my local news operation, FortBendNow, needs to fill in order to fulfill its mission as the most complete source of local news and information in Fort Bend County.
We’re only two months old, still have a tiny staff and have not yet opened the site to advertisers, but what I call the beta version of FortBendNow is drawing traffic at the rate of about 110,000 pages views a month. That’s just a fraction of where I think it should be, and where I believe it will be after a promotional campaign to allow people to discover it exists.
But considering the only promotion so far has come from these blog posts and the passing out of business cards, it’s a pretty decent first response.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 09, 2005, 07 25 am
So? Quit whining. You’re in Texas, not suburban Washington, in the middle of a home remodeling project, and certainly not in Arkansas! Ace site, Bob. Hey to C. and ‘em.
— JoAnne Dec 16, 01:27 pm #
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Check out This Old House, they had an episode in their help section where they helped a couple insulate an old farm house. From the outside, with paper stuff that you blow in with a machine. I have no idea if that stuff would hold up to the damp here, but it might be worth a shot as energy prices rise.
— R Mar 26, 02:22 pm #
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