Baby its COLD inside

Winter 2007 - No snow yet this year but it's cold enough

Virginia (actually the whole Northeast area) is going through one of the coldest snaps we've had in like 20 years and man, oh man are we feeling it.

We went to bed warm last night but woke up a little chilly and realized that our brand spanking 2month old new $6,000 furnace had decided to stop working sometime in the night. And the thermometer was reading -2 outside which doesn't make for a very warm house. Our house is heated almost entirely by hot water baseboard heaters moving very hot water through these incredible annoying pipes that cover every baseboard all over the entire house. They buckle and moan and clink and clatter all night and day during the winter, but they do a good, if not a very expensive, job of keeping our monstrous house nice and cozy. One of the reasons we just replaced our furnace is cause our heating bill last year tallied up to something near the $10,000 range. We were hoping this new one would be just a tad more efficient and also reliable (this isn't the first time we've sat in the cold in these old farm houses).

Anyhow, the kids and I went to a birthday party this morning, leaving Lias and John to fix the heaters. When we got back at 2pm they were still working on it, thinking it would be fixed any minute. After 2 more hours and poor Lias' fingers and cheeks all red and icy, me and the kids ditched the cold house for our friends Beth and Robert's house down the road. We enjoyed our 4 hour stay there and warmed up quite nicely until the guys (Robert works on the farm with John) showed up for dinner and deseret, having gotten the heat going again at last.

John hates the landlord part of his job and hates it even more when his whole Saturday is spent dealing with his own cold house and cold family. Whenever it's freezing like this he's guaranteed a few hours of dragging heaters around to rentals to unfreeze all the pipes in this old uninsulated houses. He was outside all day and just wanted a warm shower when we finally got home tonight.

But just as a big house like this doesn't loose heat quickly, it sure doesn't heat up quickly. The heaters have been back on about 3 hours now and we're still only at about 60 degrees. Unfortunately, since the house got so cold during the day, a bunch of our water pipes for the showers and such (not the pipes that push the hot water around the house but the other pipes - the plumbing is quite confusing around here) are frozen so we have to wait for the house to heat up enough to take showers and flush toilets.

But everyone is now bundled under three layers of blankets and hopefully the temps keep rising during the night. All I can say is - man, I'm glad we don't live in the days when this house had to be heated with just the fireplaces (even though there were about 8 of them)! Oh and I'm especially glad that we don't pay the heating bills either.

Winter 2007