Holidaze

Through the holidays I've been so busy I haven't even had time for a quick note on how the house is coming! Well, very slowly, but surely. Guillaume has been staying with me for the month so I hired him to find me some appliances (a fridge so far and a lead on washer and dryer... thanks to Paul and Brenton too!!) and to start steaming off the wallpaper in the northeast bedroom.

Also got the storage almost completely empty now, thanks also to Guillaume's help, and so the house is full of quite a bit of junk now! However, 2 major items are already listed on craigslist so hopefully I'll be rid of most of it soon!

I also hired Pam to rake the front lawn. I'll bet this was the last yard to be raked in the whole neighborhood! Back yard will have to wait until next year. Borrowed Doug's trailer to haul the leaves to the Intervale. The trailer badly needed a new tailgate, so I built a new one from 3/4" CDX that I think is way cool and very New Zealand-esque in its ingenuity even if I do say so. Since then I have purchased a used folding trailer seen on Craigslist which is really really cheezily built but cool because I can fold it up and store it in the garage along with whatever car I end up buying to replace the ridiculous The White Whale. With a car and the trailer I should be able to haul anything weighing up to 1000 pounds. For anything heavier there's always Uhaul. I'd have to rent a Uhaul quite a few times in a year before rivaling the cost of filling the tank in The White Whale for a year, which is about $80 a whack.

On Christmas Eve Eve we nearly had a fire. The furnace in the apartment stopped working, so I went to basement to check it out and the breaker was tripped, so I flipped the breaker back on and the furnace did come back on, but when I went back up the (outside) staircase I heard and saw quite a spark-light show! Went back and shut off the breaker and came back out to see a badly arced wire going to the emergency boiler shut-off switch that is mounted outside even though it uses interior wire. For now the shut-off switch is bypassed so we can have heat.

And... I think that's about all that's happened with the house this week! Pictures of some of this stuff coming soon.