Hot house

I've been feeling healthy for a week. M, not so much. Between some kind of bug and several migranes (poor thing) this week has been less productive than we'd hoped. And, we've had a bit of a heat problem.

We had our furnace installed about a year ago, and just in the last few weeks, had everything finished and a new propane tank installed, filled and piped. Finally we had heat. Most day's we'd get to the house and the temps would be in the high 40's. Cold for work, even with several layers on. Then we started using the heat--just a bit. We still don't have our door hardware or weatherstripping, so we didn't want to make it super warm and have all the heat escape. But we'd warm it up to 55 or so, and it made things bearable.

Then on Sunday, I was working along on my spackling (every piece of trim has many nail holes in it, and ALL need to be filled before we can tape and paint), and noticed that the vents were blowing cold air. Uh oh. I tried to turn the furnace off but even on off, the fan kept blowing. M had the same issue (I was sure she could resolve it but even the zone upstairs--we have 2 zones that operate independently--was behaving the same way), and we finally had to flip the breaker to make it go off! She left a message for the heat guy (sidebar: his name is Pat Nell, but when you say it it sounds like Patinell. So we call him Patinell. Cracks me up. Yes, I'm easy). He finally came on Thursday, and wasn't sure what the problem was, but got it working. So today, it worked wonderfully--bringing the temp up from 42 (yikes, that's cold!) to a comfortable 55. But then after it hit the set temp of 55, it climbed to 56, and so on. Uh oh. At least we have heat, but there's definitely something amiss. Did I mention that the furnace was maybe the most expensive part of the whole house? I'm sure we'll get it working . . . but for now at least there's heat.

In other actual progress, I have primed all the cabinets in the laundry room, and we're narrowing down the paint for the walls. Originally we planned on white walls (they're done) and some fun color for the cabinets, but we've reversed that.  M has finished all the wainscotting and trim in the powder room, along with the crown moulding. It looks great. We're thinking of painting the white ceiling a pale pinkish with a pearlescent tinge. More to come on that.

We finally got the sample stair nosing (another blog post entirely) and so M has started working on laying the wood floors in the loft (they run directly into the stairs, so she needed to know how big it would be before finishing the upstairs and then laying the stairs.

Tomorrow, Melissa's mom and I will build the Ikea cabinets we bought last Sunday. They'll make up the window seat and built-ins in the master bedroom. I can't wait!