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Crazy as a Loom

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Snow, sleet, freezing rain.

Take your pick.
My student cancelled, due to the bad roads, so I made good use of my day. I hemmed a 5 x 6 blue jean rug, and also hemmed one of the blue jean panels for an 11 x 15 custom rug. Then I cut and sewed strips of blue jeans for the third panel, which we are weaving tomorrow. The three panels will "rest" over the weekend, and find their destined length, and then I will sew them together.
I cleaned the back porch, and unpacked 8 boxes of cones of weaving fibers. Beautiful colors, and I will have them up on my web site soon.
The gas man came and hooked up my Monitor heater, which is in the old end of the house, and hopefully now, I won't shiver constantly when I am working out there.
I stayed warm today, because I have finally figured out that the only way to heat my 220 year old house is to heat it the way they would have when they built it, one room at a time. There are two furnaces in the cellar....an old coal furnace and an oil furnace. The coal furnace is huge, and will probably never get out of the cellar, because no,one will ever want to dismantle it. There used to be a metal grate in the floor above it, probably someone thought it would be the answer to the cold house, but I doubt that it was. And the oil furnace, hot air, is still functional, but last year it sucked up $5000 worth of fuel oil, and didn't keep the house all that toasty either.
So now I have several heat options.
I have a very large pellet stove in the living room, and it pumps out some serious heat. In the dining room, I have a Monitor heater that runs on kerosene. It keeps that part of the house very comfortable. There is a gas fireplace in the old living room, and now a gas Monitor in the old kitchen. I turn them all down when I leave, and when I am there, I turn them up. I can keep the room I am working in the most comfortable......and change when I move to another room. It is perfect. Of course, there are negatives. There is the hauling of the pellets, but I figure it is cheaper than the gym at the Y. And of course, there is still no heat upstairs. The front bedrooms might warm up if I opened the grates in the floor. But the two back bedrooms are brutally cold. The people who have lived in this house over the years were tough.

1 comment:

Eulalia Benejam Cobb said...

They must have been tough, and so are you, from the sound of it. But to live in a 220-year-old house seems enviable to me, even in winter.

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Because every thread counts