We Have a Door!

This past week we bought a door at Home Depot.  It's a Fiberglass door which is fancier than a steel door (like we have now) but looks like wood.  Wood is gorgeous but not as efficient, insulation-wise.  We bought a Feather River door that was already in stock.  After six months of looking online at doors, having three kids in the store with us, I was quick to pick a door.  We cruised down the next aisle and got the door handle.  (Before shot below)

The new door has a glass window with wrought iron throughout.  I picked a antique bronze (dark) handle and matching numbers.

A friend had a contact person that could install the door.  He arrived to give me an estimate.  I showed him a picture of what I wanted.  Showed him the current state of the door.  He said "no problem" and call me when we had the door.  We called him and he said, "Sunday morning, 8:30."

9:30am, No Carlos.

By 10:30am, I tried to call him.  No Answer.

I said to Dave, "how hard can it be?" 

Dave pulled out his various home improvement books and I said, "Joe's home." 

In case you haven't been following my blogs, Joe is the unsuspecting EMT neighbor whose life has gone from carefree weekend mornings to visits from my kids, "Hey Joe, what are you doing?  Hey Joe, watch this.  Hey Joe, look at my shoes.  Hey Joe, wanna play baseball? Hey Joe, where's Margie?  Hey Joe, your car is blue.  I like blue.  Do you like the Mets or the Yankees? Duke likes the Yankees but I think they stink like smelly cheese."

In addition to my kids swarming his house whenever they see he or his wife Margie outside, he's frequently called on for injuries.  Today, Dave saw his garage door go up and pounced.  Great news, Joe was home for the day!

As it turned out there was a lot more rot and damage than we thought.  A bonus was finding an ant nest in the rot.  (Ants LOVE wet wood).

The guys worked for several hours together.  It was a tremendous amount of detail-oriented work. 

Look closely above Joe's shoulder.  That his finger wrapped in gauze.  Yeah, our own personal on-call EMT was injured while at our house.  Thankfully he was able to work through the blood and pain.

The outside trim (casing) needs to be painted, the indoor trim needs to be installed, we need to put the new numbers up, and the porch needs to be addressed.  But the door is in, the handle locks, and the wood rot is replaced with nice, treated dry wood. 

I asked Joe, "are you still considering putting a new door on your house?"  His response was like the crack of a whip, "Nope!"

Is Anyone Else Scared?

We have a boiler which means that we heat our home and water with oil.  Yeah, that stuff that keeps going up at a ridiculous rate.

Each year we burn about 1,100 gallons of oil.  We burn oil in the summer as well since that is what heats the water.  I looked into having a hot water heater installed but was told it wasn't a good idea for two reasons:

1. It's against code.  The boiler is downstairs and the water heater would have to be upstairs and you can't have one higher than another.  Or, the heater would have to be downstairs and then it would be too close to the boiler.  Or, something I can't remember but sounded dangerous enough that I let the whole thing go.
2. Although it's running in the summer to heat water, it doesn't really burn that much oil and it's bad to shut a boiler off completely anyway.

We don't have natural gas lines out this way so even if we wanted to consider replacing our heating system (KaCHING) it isn't available anyway.

Last winter was a mild winter and yet we still froze our butts off here.  Part of that was because half of the house was literally exposed most of the time.  Kind of like heating the house with all the windows opened.  Actually, it wasn't kind of like that--it was actually that.  I couldn't wait to be roasting in my non-air conditioned house this summer after spending months wearing 3 sweaters at a time and still freezing.

So now I'm sitting here wondering if we should consider installing some other type of heating system because to be honest, I'm kinda freaking out.  Should we have a fireplace installed?

My oil tank is a 250 gallon tank.  I usually have it filled when it gets nearly empty(there are greater discounts for larger quantities).  Two winters ago I would get it filled and the price per gallon was well under $2.  Still, pretty rough writing that check every couple of months--but it was doable.  Towards the end of last winter the prices were up over $3/gallon.  So, I started biting the small discount and getting just 100 gallons at a time.  I figured this was a good way to stretch out our cash flow.

A friend of mine said, "Yeah, but I heard it might go up to $6/gallon."  I got out my trusty calculator.  Hmm... 1100 gallons times $6/gallon. 

I'd better stock up on some wool sweaters.

 

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