Backyard: Finished Product

Here's what the backyard looks like now. The girls love it, of course. And I love not having to stress over the lack of grass back there.

You Load 16 Tons...

Okay, it was only three tons. But three tons is a lot of pea gravel to shovel into a wheelbarrow and cart into the backyard. That's six thousand pounds of pea gravel. It sounds like a lot. And my aching back says it was a lot.

Here's the front-end loader loading one and a half tons into my dad's trailer:



Relatively impressive, right?

So why doesn't it look like much when it's in the yard?

Backsplash Progress

One of the first things we did when we moved to College Hill was to get rid of the old stove. It was a mammoth 1960s stove, six feet tall with push buttons. If it had worked, we would have loved to clean it up and keep it. But it did not, and it also took up the space where we were used to having a microwave (above the range), so out it went. We bought a new stove and microwave to put in, but we had to run electric to where the new microwave plugged in. This was the result:



We had to rip out all the tiled backsplash in order to cut a groove in the wall for the new wiring. We planned to replace it with new tiles identical to the old ones. We were going to get right on that.

That was two years ago.

In December of 2007, I made a New Years resolution to finish up some projects, including that backsplash (more "before" pictures at that link, including the original stove).

That was one year ago.

But today I made progress. Check this out:



Woohoo!

Rather than replacing with the same white tiles, we've opted for tin ceiling tiles. These tiles are the same gauge and type of tin that was used for ceiling tiles around the turn of the century (the last century, not this one).

Eventually I am going to replace all the ceramic tiles with the tin ones. Also in the plan: paint the cabinets; switch the knobs out for polished silver knobs; replace the current light switches with original-style push button switches. I hope these items don't take as long as getting started on the backsplash did, but at least we don't have to be quite as embarrassed when we have friends over.

Old Pictures

Back when we had the new heat pump installed, we also put more insulation in the attic. There are a few of small spaces off the attic room, where there should have been insulation but there wasn't. As I was crawling around I found a couple of interesting items. They certainly aren't the sort of thing we'd take to Antiques Roadshow, but you also won't find them in the attic space of your average modern suburban home.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

Can you spot it?



Here's a closer look:



This is a melted wire nut. That's what I found after we lost power in our basement and living room the other night. None of the breakers had tripped, so I went to the back bathroom, where a fusebox-turned-junction box is. I could smell melted plastic before I even opened the door.

A guy from Tracy Electric came out and fixed it for the night, then came back the next day to beef it up more. He apologized profusely, and he showed me exactly what had happened, what he was doing to fix it, and what they would do the next day to fix it more.

Apparently the guy who actually did the work on our house in the first place hasn't worked on old houses before, so this has been a learning experience for him. Just another public service courtesy of College Hill House.

The Beast Saves the Day

Yesterday was day two of the heat pump/air handler installation and electric upgrade. By the end of today, we should have our new system up and running.

The upgrade from 100 amp service to 200 amp service is complete, and the new breaker box is much better than the old system of two ancient breaker boxes and one (even more ancient) fuse box. I'll post some pictures of that later.

We had some excitement yesterday morning when the electrician got here. For some reason I had the mindset that the electrician would get here, shut off the power to the house for about an hour, then finish upgrading our service and turn the power back on. If I had really thought about all the work he was doing, I would have realized how silly that was. But I didn't think about it that much.

So I was a little surprised when I got a call from Niki around 9:00 yesterday morning, telling me that the electrician had just shut off the power and it was going to be off all day. It was 30 degrees when we found this out. Fortunately, the radiators retain their heat for quite a while after The Beast shuts off, so I knew we were okay for at least an hour or two. But with the workmen needing to go in and out of the house constantly, it was just a matter of time before thing started getting chilly.

After briefly considering a triplet exodus to Niki's house, I decided to do something I'd had in the back of my head for a while. Rex (a friend of mine from work) and I went to the house and set up what you see below.



It's a battery and an inverter spliced into the AC wires for the boiler. We had heat for the whole day -- in fact, even as I write this The Beast is still hooked up to that battery.

I would wager that there are very few houses in Wichita that could be heated for several days with a battery as the source of electricity. But The Beast is a gas boiler (originally coal, but it was converted), and the heat is circulated through the house by gravity: the steam rises in the pipes, and when it cools off in the radiators it turns to water (called condensate), which flows down the return pipes. There are no blowers or pumps. The only need for AC power is to open and close the valve when the thermostat tells it to. When we set this up at 11:00 yesterday morning, the battery had 12.05 volts. I just checked it again this morning, and it has 11.98. With a fully-charged deep-cycle battery, we could probably heat the house for a few days without power. Nice to know!

We had more excitement last night when we tried to turn on lights upstairs. I'll write more about that when I have time, but I have to say that Tracy Electric did an impressive job late last night, and they promised to replace anything that might have been damaged.

Halfway to New Heat

The heating and cooling trucks pulled into the drive at 8:15 this morning and left right around 5:00 pm. And they replaced this old air conditioning compressor...



...with a shiny new heat pump.



They'll be back again, though. The air handler and thermostat still have to be installed, and that will likely take most of tomorrow.

I've received the same response from several people upon hearing that we are having a heat pump installed. It's a mixture of shock, horror, and disappointment. People are surprised that we are getting rid of The Beast. Rest assured that The Beast will still be part of our family. The new heat pump will be on a new thermostat, and The Beast will still be hooked up to the old thermostat.

I'll post more tomorrow evening after (we hope) the whole system is set up.