People are always impressed by massive construction projects undertaken by groups of people, and lasting years. I’m beginning to think this house could qualify for that sort of designation.
We had a water softener installed on Monday. Yay!
The measure of hardness in water is particles. Anything over 11 particles is considered hard. Our water has 64 particles. But it doesn’t have uranium! Yay!!
As with all improvements for the house, in order to accomplish that water softener project, we had to do some other things. First, the water softener needs power, of the 110 AC variety. There is a light in the crawl space door to the immediate right of the water softener. But alas, it is low voltage 24 volts, to be precise. That means breaking sheetrock and running a new electric circuit around the room. So, for now we are running the water softener off an extension cord.
Second, we have a wood stove in the basement which was in the way of the water softener, and that meant disconnecting it and moving it a few feet across the floor, and then replacing the stove pipe with some angles. Sounds easy enough. But wood stoves are very heavy, too heavy for us to be messing with, it turns out. That’s another story.
And when we disconnected the stove from the stove pipe we discovered that a House Wren had had delusions of grandeur as to what would make a perfect nest. And he had filled up the stove pipe and stove with twigs! Needless to say, if we had tried to start a fire in the stove this coming winter, we would have only discovered this when the basement filled with smoke due to the stove pipe not drawing worth spit.
Pick up a twig, fly to the roof and up on the stove pipe, drop it in the hole, and check to see. “Is it full yet? No :(” Repeat. Thousands and thousands of times.
What a mess that made. The amount of time that small bird devoted to this massive construction project is really quite astounding, considering the stove pipe is two stories tall.
All in all, that makes the stove pipe an ‘attractive nuisance’ and we are going to put in a propane wall heater in the basement, instead of using wood heat. That way we can simply remove the stove pipe, fix the roof, and the nuisance is gone forever.
But that means we first have to move the freezer which is completely full of fruit from the garden, and a storage rack, both of which are in the area where we want to put the propane heater. Where to put the freezer is a subject of debate but we’ve decided to put it where the wood stove is located now, which means another electric outlet but since we’ll already be breaking sheetrock on that wall, that’s not much extra work.
But that means the woodstove has to leave the basement and we can’t do it. And that means finding somebody else, actually two somebody elses who are large economy size guys, to do it.
See? Massive construction project.
What, no screen at the top of the stove pipe? How come?