March 30: Heat and Water!

Took the day off work and decided to spend it…working at the house. It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the 60s, and it turns out I have forsythia in the front yard:

Until like three days ago this just looked like a bundle of dead sticks, so it was really nice to show up and see it looking like this!

The big news of the last few days is that two major utilities are connected. The water meter went in on Saturday, and the gas meter went in today. This means the furnace is also on:

It’s so shiny

There aren’t any sinks yet — I might buy a utility sink this weekend — but I can open a tap in the basement right next to the water meter and fill a bucket if I need to.

I spent a lot of time today talking with people too — the plumbers, the guys from historic preservation, the carpenter, the HVAC guys, J who brought me coffee and hung around to chat. But in between chatting, I also pulled out the rest of the bathroom subfloor and mostly cleared out the crawlspace underneath it (by sweeping a bunch of stuff that was there over the ledge into the basement. Eventually it’ll have to get hauled out but for now it’s just in a pile in the corner.) Then I sanded the four openings for the windows that are out for restoration, shopvacced around all the windows to pick up all the dust and paint junk, shopvacced the bathroom, and painted some linseed oil on the sanded windows. Tomorrow evening I can go back and put a coat of primer on the windows once the oil’s had a chance to soak in.

I’m not even sure why I’m including this image. It doesn’t look great or anything. But I can tell that it’s much cleaner than it was before I vacuumed. And it was a lot of work to get it looking this bad, so.

Finally before I crash, if you’re the praying kind send one up that the electric tie-in gets sorted out on Monday. I think that’s going to happen, but I won’t believe it until it actually does.