Fireplace Inserts - Part 1

The two inserts on the main floor went in fairly easily.  A long time ago we'd removed the plaster from the basement ceiling.  That gave easy access to run the gas lines.

The installers hooked up the living room fireplace so that we could use it prior to the inspection next week.  The photos show before and after the installation of the insert.  There's a roaring fire in the after picture; it raises the temperature on the first floor at least 3 degrees!

Once the inspection passes, the installers can come back and put on the face plates.

If everything works out, they'll all be done just in time for She Who Must Be Obeyeds next big party.

Hopefully this time I won't be installing a chandelier at midnight the night before...

Using The Right Tools?

When you're getting gas fireplace inserts installed, do you expect that this is the special tool that is needed?

The guys had a 20 foot ladder.  It's not long enough to get to the roof to drop the new flues into place.  So they needed this...

When we moved in, we had the chimneys cleaned and inspected.  Not surprisingly, the flues were in bad shape.  So bad that we couldn't use the fireplaces without risking burning the house down.  Enough of the mortar is missing that we'd get "heat transfer" and start the walls on fire.

Of course, the cost to re-line one chimney is about the same as converting 3 fireplaces to gas inserts.  Pretty simple decision there...

We've known we wanted to do this for a long time, so we'd been looking at various options.  It turns out that the fireplaces were originally coal-burners.  For those, the fireboxes are smaller than in a wood-burning fireplace.  The net result is that most inserts are too big to fit, so our choices were somewhat limited.

We finally get enough other things done to prioritize the fireplaces.  It didn't hurt that the timing worked out with a sale at the vendor we'd picked a while back.

The installers showed up today and things went pretty smoothly (other than not having a suitable ladder ;-).

The installation is mostly done.  The new gas lines just need to be inspected before the face-plates can be installed.  All that should be done about this time next week.

Aaaargh!

She Who Must Be Obeyed wanted a mirror above the dining room fireplace.

After the walls have been painted.

Not so bad if you frame the mirror like a picture and hang it like one.

On the other hand...

If you want to attach it directly to the wall without any sort of mechanical fastener...

Then you need some way to hold it in place while the adhesive cures.

I tried many approaches to avoid putting holes in the freshly painted mill work.

But no joy.

So I ended up with this.

Now I get to patch the holes and repaint.

And you can't just touch up the spots because you can never get the sheen to match quite right.  You have to paint the whole surface to a natural edge.

Bleeding Radiators

It's that time of year again.

When it starts getting cold, it's time to bleed the radiators.  Usually you can tell which ones need to be bled by whether they get warm or not.  ;-)

We've been in the house long enough to recognize a pattern.  There are a couple in the attic that get a little air in them.  The rest are typically fine except for one in the kitchen.  For some reason it always has a lot of air in it.  And that means the kitchen is stone cold while the rest of the house is quite comfortable.

If you look closely, you can't find the guilty radiator in this picture.

That's not because it isn't there.

Rather, it's because it's cleverly disguised as a set of kitchen cabinets.

That's right.  It's that little slot underneath the window that lets the hot air escape from the radiator (normally the perforated metal grate on the counter covers the hole; I've removed it to get to the bleed valve).

It's extremely effective at keeping our seldom used baking dishes pre-heated.

It's also effective at taking up lots of cupboard space.

It's not so good at keeping the kitchen warm.

Oh boy am I itching to completely remodel this kitchen...

Carriage House Doors - Part 2

Early in the year we had new carriage house doors installed.

The doors were primed prior to being installed back in January.  Obviously it was a little to cold to paint then, so I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

For no particular reason, I guess.

Last weekend I finally got a round to putting on the finish coat of paint, just in time as it were - overnight lows are expected to be in the 20s over the weekend...

It's the same color as the trim on the house and it works well with the stone.

Boiler Pump

A few weeks ago it started to get a little cool at night.  We haven't had the heating plant "cleaned" since we moved in four years ago, so we figured it was time before we needed to turn on the heat for the winter.  We also received a "Fall Tune-up" special in the mail that happened to be from the same company that installed the new boiler for the previous owners. Things were starting to align.

When I turned on the boiler, the pump started to make an awful racket.  It didn't make that noise last year.

Good timing.

When the service guy came he checked everything out.  Everything on the boiler all looked good, except the pump.  It would run for a while, make an awful racket, and then shut off.  So they ordered a new pump and would come back in 10 days or so to install it.

Meanwhile, it started to get chilly at night so we broke out the blankets.

When the new pump arrived they came to install it.  It took several hours to drain the system before they could remove the old pump.  There's a lot of water in those old pipes.

When they finally could remove the old pump, they discovered that the blades on the impeller were pointed the wrong way.

It's a wonder we got any heat at all...

Scrape and Sand

Once I removed all the old nails and staples, I could start preparing the frames to be re-painted.  I paused halfway through to take this picture.  The one on the bottom/left is already done.  The top/right one is untouched.

The paint had some serious "alligatoring", so it was time to get down to bare wood.  I spent most of the day with a heat gun, orbital sander, and dremel to get into all the nooks and crannies.

I still have a bit of work to do to repair the bottom edge of each door before starting the painting process.

And the screw holes for the hinges are shot so they need the dowel and glue treatment.

Choosing Fasteners

Let's say you were choosing fasteners to attach the small, 3/8-inch thick piece of molding in the center of the picture.  Which do you choose?
a - the 2.5-inch brad at the top
b - the 1.25-inch brad second from top
c - the 3/4-inch brads at the bottom

For some, the correct answer might be c - the 3/4-inch.
Apparently, the right answer is d - all of the above.  Or what ever random fasteners you have lying around.

I'm in the process of re-screening the french doors for the pedimented window.  These are the random mix of nails used to hold this small screen molding in place.  You can see a piece of the molding still attached to the door at the far right of the picture.  You can also catch a glimpse of the small bit of screen that was still in place.

The molding came off in about a million pieces, so it's not salvageable.  What was underneath the molding was equally interesting.

There were bits of at least three different kinds of screen.  Each was attached with different types of fasteners: tacks and at least 3 different types of staples.  Obviously this has been re-screened many times over the life of the house and no one has bothered to removed the remnants of the previous installation(s)...

So I get to do it.

Sweating Pipes

This is the story behind adding the water line for the new fridge.

There is all manner of water lines down in the basement.  It's an impressive historical record of water supply lines throughout history, both galvanized and copper pipe.

And there's some interesting stuff, too.

• Shutoff valves in random places (the one the hot line shuts off the kitchen and the master bath, while the cold one only shuts off the kitchen sink!).
• Shutoff valves that are labelled for gas rather than water...
• Random pipe diameters.  A 1-inch line that randomly chokes down to 3/4-inch for no apparent reason.
• Short bits of pipe soldered together to make a longer run.  It's only a 3-foot run, why not one 3-foot piece rather than 6 6-inch pieces with 5 couplings?
• Lines that are capped-off in odd places.  Not near the last branch, but 10 feet after the last branch.

Someday, when we remodel the kitchen and master bath, I'm going to replace all this junk with PEX.

At any rate, I had to tap into an existing copper water line.  Though I'm getting better at sweating the joints, I'm still not good enough.

Well, good enough to get a joint that doesn't leak, but not good enough to get a pretty one.

Or, apparently, to prevent a little excess molten solder from dropping onto my finger.

Lovely isn't it?

Only a few bad words were spoken...

New Fridge

 One of the last appliances from when we bought the house was the fridge.  It's been a little under the weather since day 1.

The ice maker had something caught in it (looked like an old ziplock bag), so it was all jammed up and wouldn't work.  Naturally, the water line for the ice maker was connected to the back of the fridge, but the other end was just dangling down in the basement.  The was no indication that it had been connected to anything.  No shutoff valve with a missing connection.  No capped-off branch line.  Nothing.

The face plate surrounding the crisper drawers would fall off at the slightest touch.

Things at the back of the fridge would freeze solid while things at the front or in the door would be slightly below room temperature.  Regardless of the temperature setting.  It would be especially bad during hot weather.

And the thing would make more noise than a 727 at takeoff.

The hope was that we could live with it until we gutted the kitchen...  We'd been trying to nurse it for as long as possible so we could avoid getting a temporary one, but...  The hot weather over the past month forcing us to throw out a bunch of 3 day old food that had become a science experiment was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Friday night I pulled out the old fridge (see top photo).  Much amusement and muttering resulted from the science experiment that was exposed.  Note - the only thing we're responsible for in that picture is the stray nerf bullet.

SWMBO spent two hours scraping up the crud that had been beneath the old one.  Good thing she was wearing a hazmat suit.  The results are shown in the bottom photo.  Note the shiny new water line that's properly connected down in the basement.  There's a story behind that, too...

At any rate, the new fridge came Saturday morning.  And we don't have to go to the store to buy bags of ice any more...