Warm Carriage House
by Laurel ~ November 18th, 2008
Very good news here yesterday! The plumber we hired turned out to be a gem! He disconnected the small 2.5 gallon water heater, connected the 40 gallon tank, made sure the heat tape around the pipes is functional, checked out all the pipes for splits (3 needed replacement, see picture above) and got the heating system tuned and running! By early afternoon he returned to the house to report it was already 65 degrees in the carriage house! This information was received with some serious smiles by us as it was already snowing outside.
This is wonderful news because we have guests that will make use of the carriage house over the Thanksgiving holiday. A very huge series of tasks can be crossed off the list as we turn to the next set of tasks.
The remaining carriage house task list is really about cleaning and making the place presentable. The bathroom needs a serious scrub, shower curtain needs hanging. The entire place needs a vac and dust. Plus there are so many boxes we need to find some order for — it won’t be carriage house beautiful for Thanksgiving, but it will be carriage house spic-and-span and be a pleasant place to hang out.
The plumber will be back tomorrow, because we have two more pipe splits we are aware of (in the garden spigots). Also, Llewellyn wants him to provide some options on a automatic water feed for the furnace (we need to go into the basement to fill the furnace with water almost daily at this point). Also interested in the possibilities for a permanent dehumidifier in the basement. After Thanksgiving we will probably hire him to help us out with the bathroom updates too.
Plus, the bill was actually reasonable.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Um, I could be totally clueless here, but if you’re losing that much water, shouldn’t your concerns be greater than simply “how do I easily add more water to the system”?
I would think that that would mean that the water is getting out somewhere in the house, which would be bad.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Actually it did occur to us, but we didn’t see any evidence of moisture. Given the house size of 4000 SF+ we assumed it was simply working hard. The plumber just left today however and did notice a minute leak in a steam pipe in an area we had not seen — so the maintenance / tune-up paid off.
November 23rd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
[...] Remember when I said last week how smoothly the repairs had gone? That was Murphy, playing with us. My week actually went something like this: [...]