Survival. A Renovation Reality.
We're hunkering down here at HouseinProgress for a long, cold, dark winter. Very Little House on the Prairie.
This is partly due to the fact that short days work against us; can't work much in the evening. And partly due to the fact that I am, once again, going through a wicked, messy med change that makes a hospital bed sound very, very good.
So, we aren't advancing in leaps and bounds. Poor Paul (hi Paul!) pulled his back recently and so the second floor bath...? Not going anywhere fast. Backs are important and they get priority.
We need to seal up the house against the elements and quickly! Aaron is working on the insulation...I'm trying to do my part as well.
Right now we are into keeping the house warm and saving money on heat.
We put up the storm windows last weekend but I think we lose a couple of them somewhere in the house each season. Currently there are 4 full-sized ones and 3 tiny casement ones missing.
Is this like socks in the laundry? Where do they go? No, really. Are we the only ones stuff like this happens to?
So, we have entered survival mode. We've even whipped out that kinda tacky but "make-do" product....
...insulation plastic for windows! (Ohhh, pretty. Not.)
Right now, I have a few hours each day where my body will do what I ask it to do because of this health mess. I keep chanting through gritted teeth, "Baby steps. Okay, one thing each day minimum. One thing. One thing..."
Tonight, that one thing was my focus on window locks. Once I get layers of paint cleaned off of the window locks, I can reinstall them and make sure that our double-hungs are tightly locked this winter. This presses the wood into the frames and forms a seal against drafts.
So I cooked up some hardware soup late last night...mmmm. (Tudor and Verona Jeff from the Bungalow Forum turned us on to this one.) It's great for quickly removing layers of paint from hardware. Just a little water, a little baking soda, and...voila! **
Coco is less than impressed with my soup. Nothing for hungry Labs here.
It's all about staying warm and getting things done in small steps. I wish it was more about making things pretty right now, but this IS survival. A renovation reality.
** (If you use this technique, don't use a pot that you use for everyday cooking. Because there might be lead paint on that hardware. This little pot was sacrificed from the Boy Scout Room in the basement.)
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Comments
When I lived in old apartment buildings in Chicago, I swore by that insulating window plastic. I got pretty good at tightening it with the heat from the hair dryer. I also loved that gray clay-ey caulking cord that you can press into the gaps. It was so fabulous to remove it all each spring!
Posted by: Fran | November 11, 2004 7:50 PM
P.S. Best of luck with your health. Hang in there. Your web missives are enjoyed by many! (As you know!)
Posted by: Fran | November 11, 2004 7:52 PM
Crazy about your windows... we put our storms in a couple weeks ago and I swear we have about two EXTRA show up every year.... Some are even painted weird colors. Not sure what's going on, but we're always finding crazy stuff in our house. Just two weeks ago I was cleaning out a storage room that we've never used and I found a whole war going on with little green plastic army men on a shelf. It looks almost as if the child was rudely interrupted (possibly by puberty???) and never came back to clean up the troops.
Posted by: erin | November 12, 2004 7:34 AM
Oh, I feel for ya. Believe me. Were you around for our coldest winter in decades--I think it was January 1994, when the temperature got down to -23 F? We were in a drafty apartment in a renovated hotel in East Hyde Park with very old windows. On the ninth floor, facing west, so we got the full impact of the wind. We tried the window insulation kits--didn't work too well, for some reason. Then I tried rope caulk, but we had a psycho kitty who liked to eat it (?!?). We finally had to drape all the blankets we owned over the windows to keep the wind out--it kinda sorta worked, but we were still miserable and spent all our time in the bedroom, which was the smallest room in the apartment that had its own steam heat. The place was ugly and looked like a scene from an Ashcan School painting, but pretty doesn't matter when you're trying to stay warm.
Posted by: tully monster | November 12, 2004 11:31 PM
Storm windows...you know the funny thing is I just learned this weekend that they aren't supposed to be up year-round. I guess the reason we haven't lost any is because we never take them off!
Sometimes I think that growing up in Colorado only prepped us for being bad Midwesterners. We know nothing about A/C, storm windows, mowing lawns...:)
Posted by: tchotchke | November 15, 2004 10:31 AM
If all else fails you can try what DH and I did in our first house - wedge cardboard into the windows and then hang a blanket over that. I was so embarassed that we had to do that, but hey, at at least we didn't turn into popsicle people in our sleep.
Posted by: Kristin | November 15, 2004 4:37 PM