Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Warming it up.

Just like "Kris Kross" tried to do in the early ninety's, we are now trying to "warm it up". So here's the story. Our house had a mud room off the back of the house. We tore the old mud room off as it had fairly large issues with rot. Our basement was poured with space for a new mud room. We can't enclose this section of the basement and build a new mud room, until the cement man has poured our basement floor. The plumbers laid the underfloor plumbing in and we were all ready for the cement man a week or two ago. We called him and he said he would be out soon. We called him again today, and he made it quite clear there was no way he was coming out to work on the basement until next spring. He actually hung up on Christy! Our cement man is quite good with cement, but unfortunately he's not so good when it comes to dealing with people.
We still need to warm it up though. We can't live in a hotel forever. Once as we get the basement warm the plumbers can start running the water into the house. Once as the house gets warm, we can hang the dry wall in the bathroom, and start patching drywall else where.
So Christy and I spent yesterday sealing up the upstairs to get it all ready to be heated up. Christy had to work today and I spent the day getting the basement ready to be warmed up. Here is our temporary "wall o' insulation" sectioning off the mud room portion of the basement:
I'll tack up some plastic on the other side to keep the drafts to a minimum.

Here we closed in the gaps in the basement sandwiching insulation between two pieces of plywood:
And here is my favorite part of the house:
The one thing we really splurged on. A Jotul stove. It's going to be our only source of heat for a while so we figured we might as well get a nice one. We are both looking forward to the day that we can sit around the warm fire with a good book. Maybe next year?
Joe

5 comments:

klineola said...

I'm sorry you all are having such a rough time. It's too bad that your tradesman doesn't seem very dependable. I hope you guys have plenty of dry wood and can stay close to that nice Jotul. Looks just like the one we just bought for our house, an F3?

Be well. Hang in there, it'll all be worth it after you're settled in.

Mom/Pat said...

Your stove is beautiful - I am willing to bet you two ingenious folk will figure out a way to snuggle comfortably in front of the stove with a book this winter!

Joe and Christy said...

Hey Michael,
Are you loving your new stove? Ours is a Jotul 400. I'm pretty excited about it. The secondary burn feature is pretty great. I love watching the small bursts of flame rush across the ceiling of the stove

MH said...

Sorry to hear your concrete guy hung up on you... He's obviously not a great communicator. When I worked in the concrete industry another lifetime ago we would not pour outdoors unless the temp was 32(above zero) and rising for at least ten hours. You will get a better floor by waiting for spring and maybe a different concrete guy - but what a lot of extra work.

klineola said...

We have a F3 and it is amazing. It's like there is a burner up there!
As for my studio, I'm having trouble getting the electricians back to finish up their work, it's really frustrating. You know? I'll just do it myself , I guess. When someone tells you they'll be there on Friday, it usually means Monday...