So...what's new with you?

Us, well, now that the weather is a little nicer we've been shuttling back and forth between Old Town and our new house in an attempt to both get a handle on our heating and plumbing system woes, and also to move some of our little projects forward a bit.

I'm not sure what it is, perhaps it's the fact that the house has no functional heat or plumbing, but Wendy and I are somewhat to very overwhelmed by the whole situation at any given time. That being said, it's a pretty overwhelming situation, so I'm going to go ahead and give us a pass on feeling the way we do.

So the $64,000 question (oh man, hope it's not actually that expensive), what's the plan for the plumbing and heating situation?

Well, the short of it, we're not quite sure yet, but we're doing a TON of research.

We've actually met with five contractors to get quotes and ideas about our system. On one hand we could do a straight repair of the system with a new boiler and new baseboard radiators throughout the house, but it essentially needs to be a completely new system. Every old solder joint is suspect and every radiator has some damage, so we're pretty much starting from scratch since it was all so heavily damaged.

But rather than just starting over with what we had, we're taking a hard look at all of our options to figure out what we should have.

I think we're also going to take this opportunity to throw some additional money into the project to add central air to the house while planning things out. It just feels like the right time to tackle this project, in spite of just adding more complexity onto our plate.

So at this point we need to make some planning decisions with whichever contractor we choose to work with. We'll have to choose fuel/energy, deciding between oil, propane, or electric. We'll need to choose heat source type, deciding between boiler with radiant, traditional forced air, high velocity forced air, mini-splits (okay, likely not mini-splits), or some combination of approaches. And we'll need to plan for any future items we may be interested in doing and how it could impact the new system, either in the short or long term, like grey water recovery, geothermal heat source, or eventual solar. It's a TON to think about. But I'm excited to start making decisions and sharing them, and our justification for making them here on the blog. Maybe our thought process might help someone else in planning their system.

In other news we've been making little updates here and there in the house. Wendy has been beautifying where possible, which included giving our house numbers a little refresh. I know it's a tired trend, but we're now doing a little spray painting with oil rubbed bronze. (I promise we won't do it all over our house!)

She also painted the front door Benjamin Moore's Wythe Blue, and we're just thrilled with the results. It's more of a sea glass color, so the green undertones work well with the green roof on the house. 

Wendy has also spent several days completing the unglamorous job of priming five unfinished adirondack chairs. We'll also paint these Wythe Blue and can't wait to try them out around the fire pit or on the porch until we have a more permanent seating solution out there. Regardless, it will sure beat moving the folding dining chairs outside every time we want to enjoy the view and a meal.

We've learned that a tree that's struggling a little bit is actually a very nice cherry blossom. We'll need to figure out how to prune it up some and take care of a disease that appears to be on its limbs, but it still made for a rather lovely look.

Taming the gardens has been high on our list while our indoor work is at a standstill. This included the trimming back of some massive round of sea grass next to our porch.

We've also been completely enthralled with Ben and Sally, our newest neighbors. (We've named them.)

They're the new Osprey that have taken up residence in their nests and they are just interesting neighbors. They're extremely vocal and love to call to each other. And they also love to fish, which is amazing to watch.

They swoop down into the chop of the water with their outstretched talons and pluck huge fish right out of the water. I hope to get a good photo of that activity before too long.

And finally, we're taking every low tide opportunity to clean up our neighbor's abandoned beach of debris that has collected over the years. There's a lot of crap out there. It looks like someone drove a car into the water about 50 years ago, and there's a fair amount of things that haven't completely rusted away.

Well, that's what we've been up to, you know, besides worrying about work, life in general, and all the other boring stuff everyone can more or less commiserate on.

So I have a question and we'd love some of your input. If you were planning out a new HVAC system in your 100+ year old house in our neck of the woods with moderate insulation, what would your approach be? Heat pump? Boiler? High-velocity? Electric? Oil? Propane? Solar? Geothermal? Nuclear Cold Fusion?