Furnace Update

The furnace is fixed. Apparently. I hope.

No heat all day Saturday. That afternoon I made a batch of sugar cookies, but 350 degrees in a modern oven doesn't do much to warm up the kitchen, let alone the house. The house temperature went down to 44 and stayed there.

Oh, well, the cookies rolled and cut out beautifully on the marble board. No trouble with sticky dough at all.

In the meantime, I turned off the pilot light and the gas to it. No point in running it if it wasn't going to do any good.

Just as an experiment, though, I turned the ignition back on around 7:30. Went upstairs to make some phone calls, came back down twenty minutes later, and hey, presto! the furnace was on! And proceeded to run the thermostat up two degrees above its setting.

No complaints about that. Went to bed, woke up yesterday morning, and the furnace was off. Again. 50 degrees and dropping. 49 degrees by the time I left for church.

It was a very good day to have things scheduled outside the house until nearly 7:00 PM. I returned to find the inside temperature stabilized at 43 degrees (21 outside). Made another batch of cookies. And lots of hot tea. The coldest part was unloading the dishwasher. Those stoneware plates and bowls were freezing!

A bit before 11:00 PM, I tried the ignition again. Just for fun. And what do you know? the heat kicked on! I goosed up the thermostat to a temperature I figured would require the furnace to stay on all night and not cycle off, and apparently it worked. I still had heat this morning.

But that didn't solve the problem of why the system wasn't working properly in the first place.

Around 8:00 this morning, I got a call from the heating and cooling people. A third person, different from either I'd spoken to before, was on the line. "Your heat is off?" he asked.

"Wait a minute," I temporized. (I admit it-- I was still wrapped in my warm covers, putting off getting up and out into the cold.)

I went downstairs to check the thermostat (the register in the bedroom never gives much heat; no point checking that). 59 degrees. "Let's say I have intermittent heat." And I described what had been going on.

"Could it be your air filter?"

What? I went through this with their other guy on Friday!

"No, I just replaced it less than a month ago."

"It still could be dirty."

"I checked it on Friday. It's gray, but not filthy."

"Do you have a programmable thermostat? Maybe it's just the program cycling off."

"No, I don't have it set that low!"

"Well, maybe it's the factory settings."

I about lost it. "Nooooo!!! At 43 degrees?!" Good grief, man, don't patronize me! And don't you guys communicate? I went through all this with your colleague the day before yesterday!

"Well . . . "

"Do you have the serial number?" I asked.

Of course he didn't. He didn't have anything. But he said, "I'll be out within the hour."

More like an hour and a half. The serviceman was younger than I'd visualized. Funny, but his questions had made me imagine a middle-aged, burly, "I've-got-all-the-answers-and-the-homeowner-knows-nothing" type. I apologized for having lost my patience with him (if other people are acting like idiots, no point in being an idiot yourself) and showed him downstairs.

Having turned off the furnace, he turned on the now-futile ignition. "This unit doesn't have a pilot light," he said.

"But I saw---"

"It's not on all the time. It's got an electric ignition. Did you hear this clicking when it wasn't turning on?"

I listened. "Yes, but I thought it was the metalwork rattling or something" (guess this homeowner doesn't know everything!) "You mean it's like the burners on my gas stove?"

Yes, indeed. Having fished my calico cat out of the bowels of the furnace, I took myself and her upstairs and left him to it. And after a few minutes of poking and prodding, after him having me jack the thermostat up to see what that did, after some turning off and on of switches, the serviceman called me back down the basement.

"It was your ignition sensor. Your pilot light was coming on, but the sensor couldn't tell, so it wasn't turning the gas on. I've cleaned it, and I've shut the furnace off and on twice to make sure. Here, I'll do it again." He hit the switch (which is, as I'd recalled, at the breaker box) off, then on. The furnace shut off, then powered back up. "I think that was it."

And apparently it was. He took the home warranty call fee and went on his way.

And God willing, that will do it. Though I can see that getting somebody out to clean the whole shebang wouldn't do any harm. But not this firm, most likely. I'd like somebody who's a little better at internal communication.

Enforced Energy Conservation

This is what my thermostat read when I came downstairs this morning:

I assure you, I am not that energy conscious. Nor that cheap.

My dad was that cheap. He removed the furnace from his house entirely and got through the Midwestern winters by wearing his overcoat constantly and running space heaters in closed rooms. He swore he wasn't going to give the gas company any more than he absolutely had to.

I, too, economize on energy. But not that much. I routinely set the thermostat back to 55 degrees at night and stay warm and cozy under five covers and three cats. But by 8:37 in the morning I really do expect the temperature to be heading back up towards 61.

Wednesday morning, the thermostat said 53 degrees when I got up, but the furnace straightened itself out. Probably had nothing to do with the fiddling I did with the fan switch.

Thursday morning was a bit warmer outside: no trouble with the heat.

Friday morning, yesterday, the outside temps dove back into the mid-20s. And my thermostat read 52 degrees. Then 51.

I called the home warranty people, who had a heating and cooling repair company call me. Yes, sir, the furnace motor is going. No, sir, the fan and the gas burner are not running. Yes, sir, the pilot light is on. No, sir, I can't seem to find the switch for the furnace motor. Yes, sir, I've found the label inside the furnace . . . oh, look, I think it says this unit was installed in 1987! No, sir, that is really not surprising, it was my POs-1 who put in the forced air system . . . No, sir, I still haven't found the switch you describe . . . oh! look! the burner and the fan just came on!

That's good, the heating guy said, because they were pretty booked up that day. Call them back on Monday to let them know if they should still come out.

I did not wait till Monday. Not with the thermostat reading 46 degrees F. Not with it again in the 20s outside. A number of calls and some futile fiddling with switches later, the maintenance guy has determined the problem is the module. Which he can't get till Monday. And hopefully it's not some other part I forget the name of: that'd mean replacing the whole furnace.

(Though given that I have a replacement warranty, that might not be a bad thing. Even the sort of bog-standard furnace the home warranty company will pay for has got to be more energy-efficient than the unit I've got!)

Meanwhile, I get to rough it through the weekend and most of Monday. Baking Christmas cookies was not on today's calendar. But, um, I think I just changed my plans . . .

As Builts

According to my doctor, I've contracted The Bronchial Crud That's Going Around. Doesn't make me too fit to strip woodwork these past couple of weeks. But maybe that's just as well, since my student AutoCAD license expires on the 17th of this month, and after that I won't be able to open the program, let alone practice on it or play with it.

But as long as I've got it, I'm using it to document some features of the house, and maybe to work out some ideas I have for the upstairs bathroom.

The last couple or three days have been devoted to doing an as-built drawing of the living room fireplace. It certainly is a unique feature of the house; I'm thinking it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a measured drawing of it stored off-site in case anything happened.

Here's the results so far. So far and maybe no farther. I've left off the surface ornament, but I've got plenty of photos to show that.
But did I say this was an "as-built"? Not exactly. My fireplace exhibited the same phenomenon as did my staircase-- regardless of how many measurements I took, no matter how often I checked and double-checked them, I couldn't get all the dimensions to agree. In some places it's as much as an inch off, but I can't adjust that inch without throwing other dimensions into chaos. I tell myself it's because the mantelpiece has settled and it's out of true. But not that far out of true! Surely, I'd notice it if it were. It'd drive me crazy looking at it if it were!

But it doesn't. I don't know . . . one more instance of the house keeping its secrets . . .

Wallpaper Progress, on My Part at Least

After working on them for the last month and more, I've finally finished drawing up the elevations of my 1st and 2nd floor halls with the dado wallpaper layout.

I have a lousy case of bronchitis and feel like something a Humvee ran over. I really should be in bed soothing my brain watching mindless videos.

But my student AutoCAD license turns into a pumpkin sometime next month, and everytime I try to sleep with my cough, my dreams turn into torture sessions where I'm trying to finish these drawings or trying to figure out how to calculate the right amount of William Morris "Blackthorn" wallpaper for the dado that runs diagonally up the stairs. Pattern matches and all.

So I've been working on it, and as of this evening I've drawn all the elevations I need for the purpose. And I've done my take-offs for the amount of paper needed, two different ways, and have a number I can rely on.

So I've gone on the Sanderson's Fabrics site and filled out my order form-- 10% discount for quantity, how nice-- and I'm happy to see that the pound-dollar exchange rate isn't as bad as it has been. At least, not according to their calculator.

So now I can push the "Checkout Now" button and see what I'm in for for shipping and handling and get this order in, in, in-- right?

Not right. Because after initially being so expeditious with the samples, Sanderson's has dropped the ball for the past five weeks and hasn't sent me the final-approval swatches I asked for in mid-October.

Well, maybe they did send them and they got lost in the post. Over the Atlantic.

So laryngitis and all, I'm calling Yorkshire tomorrow to see if I can move things along.

And maybe while I'm coughing my way through tonight's slumbers, my mind can roil away at something else.

Nasty Bits

No, not that kind.

I mean the four jamb trim pieces I stripped today.

I was really hoping to stop the current paint stripping campaign at the top of the steps from the first floor. It's tacky enough subsisting with my living room, dining room, and first floor hall denuded of trim. It's quite enough to have to overlook the black-dusty-crumbly grossitude that is the exposed plaster where trim once reposed on the walls of the first floor. I really didn't want to tackle the trim of the five doors, one window, and miscellaneous baseboard in the second floor hall as well. Couldn't I restrict the squalor to one floor only?

No, I could not. The wallpaper and/or paint that starts in the downstairs hall will have to go all the way up. No stripped trim upstairs, no nice new stairhall walls upstairs or down. Those five doors, one window, and miscellaneous baseboards had to be done, now.

So I'm doing it. The trim of the window and three of the doors I tackled last weekend. Today my goal was to strip that last of the long jamb pieces, the two from the bedroom doorway and the two from the closet.

Should have taken me five hours. Maybe six, maximum. Instead, I was at those four nasty pieces of work from shortly after 10:00 this morning till nearly 8:00 this evening, with maybe a half hour out for a mid-afternoon snack.

The problem? On the first two, splintery places some previous owner(s) hadn't bothered to glue down before painting them over. Rather, the object seemed to be to get as much paint behind the splinters as possible. You can literally while away hours trying to dig that out.

And then, of course, these damaged places need to be reglued. Which they should have been several decades ago.

With the third piece, it soon became apparent that it wasn't the original trim. Original to the house, but I think it started out someplace else, someplace where it was painted from the beginning. All except one edge, which was stained and shellacked under the paint. Very strange. There's a story there having to do with the time my POs-1 converted the third bedroom into a dressing room/walk-in closet. But I won't insert my conjectures now.

The paint on this piece, even after two laborious, time-consuming attacks with the heat gun and scraper, still wouldn't yield to the liquid refinisher. Had to order in the light artillery and use the palm sander. It now has squiggly sanding marks all over it, but I Do Not Care. It's stripped, that's the point, and I'll deal with the squiggles later.

This piece also had a chip that needed glued back in, but it broke in two and the heatgun blower blew one of them onto the floor where it got lost amidst the paint shavings. Oh, Darn.

Fourth piece I did this evening only because I finally got the Project Tracker working (with help from Larry at Simpson's Folly) and I wanted to post another percentage point.

So there I was out on my screened-in porch at 7:30 PM. It was dark outside, the north wind was rising, the temperature plummeting, the rain was thinking about turning to sleet or even snow, and I was stripping woodwork. I couldn't be sure if the vapor I was seeing was smoke from the work piece or my own breath, and my feet were so cold I had to resist the temptation to turn the heatgun onto my shoes. But I wanted it done.

The last jamb piece wasn't as awful as the others: it just had a lot of that old blue wall color ingrained in the outer edge. Lovely pasttime, freezing your fingers with cold refinisher in colder weather.

My right shoulder needs the chiropractor, I'm so tired I'm liable to forget I have dinner in the oven, but the nasty things are stripped.

Hooray.

Halfway

" . . . [H]alfway. A midpoint in any venture is difficult because that's the place where days gone and miles done equal those ahead, and the result is equilibrium, stasis, inertia. A rollercoaster nearly stops just before the last drop to the finish. In some ways, the first mile of the second half is the most crucial because it's the one that propels the traveler down the slope of endurance to destination. . . . "

Thus sayeth William Least Heat-Moon in his book River Horse: A Voyage Across America. Mr. Heat-Moon was in the middle of navigating America's rivers via a C-Dory, a canoe, and miscellaneous other craft from the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Hudson River to the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia. I'm in the middle of stripping my house's woodwood piece by paint-covered piece from the dining room on the first floor to the hallway on the second, taking in the living room, front room, first floor hall, and the staircase on the way.

A couple hours ago I stripped piece No. 168. That's 50% of my 336 piece tally. Halfway. Half done.

So here's the question: Am I going to fall prey to the midpoint inertia that Mr. Heat-Moon describes? For him, it gets worse:

"While we were still some miles shy of being exactly halfway, I knew I had already emotionally arrived there. So I dragged up onto my feet, doleful, depressed, dejected, disgruntled, dissatisfied, dissipated, discouraged, disheartened, downcast, and otherwise down at the mouth, and I went into the damp, dreary, dismal day drooping, despondent, disconsolate, and damnably in the deep doldrums."

Well, it is undeniably dreary today in southwestern Pennsylvania. After a week of lovely Indian summer weather, today it's gray, cold, and soggy, and if the temperature got above 50 degrees it was a wonder. It was not fun to go out on the back porch and strip woodwork. The wind was blowing. My feet were freezing. If it hadn't been for the heatgun, I coulda got frostbite!

(Yeah, right.)

I have every excuse to fall into the halfway doldrums.

But I won't.

How do I know I won't?

Because I went ahead and stripped piece No. 169! I'm over the top! I'm on the drop to the finish! I'm descending the downward slope of endurance to my destination!

And oh, yeah, I've also put off doing the front room with its 60 to 70 trim pieces until that dim, distant day when the dining room, the living room, and the stairhall from bottom to top are done, done, done-- trim, wallpaper, floors (as needed), and all.

Wonderful how encouraged you can feel when you can delude yourself about the true magnitude of the job.

Random Rightbrain Thoughts . . .

Mind floaters while stripping woodwork:

. . . Why is there so much spackle-filler stuck on the door and window trim pieces? Are the gaps between them and the jambs really that yawning? . . .

. . . Did my POs-1 really paint their kitchen trim battleship gray? . . .

. . . Could I hire out and do this for a living? . . .

. . . 139 done, 197 to go . . .

. . . There's a sweetsy smell off this paint when I go at it with the heatgun . . . Lead? Or just the foam insulation igniting? . . .

. . . Look at all these dings and depressions . . . steam them all out? Get away with wood putty? Maybe I can just say the piece is "aged" . . .

. . . I can put the trim back up to minimize those gaps-- can't I? . . .

. . . Hold back the winter, Indian summer, I'm not sure if I can take the snow . . .

. . . Nah, I make too many boo-boos. And wouldn't the demand be down "in these economic times"? . . .

. . . Will dark garnet shellac be enough to recover the original tone of the wood, or will I have to stain all these pieces? . . .

. . . Those stair balusters that back up to the wall, I really don't want to strip them in place . . .

. . . Clear silicone sealant after it's all back up and shellacked. Unless the gaps are too wide?

. . . What if I get the stain color wrong and have to redo a piece? . . .

. . . 142 done, 194 to go . . .

. . . John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, that's my name, too . . .

. . . Oh, crap! Did I just run the belt sander over its own cord? . . .

. . . Well maybe, if it turns out beautifully, I could post pictures and advertise . . .

. . . Maybe somebody on the Houseblogs site can tell me how to take my stair rail apart without destroying it? . . .

. . . Good grief, look at the condition of those jambs! What happened there?? Glad I'm not the one who perpetrated that . . .

. . . Go in and out the window, go in and out the window, go in and out . . .

. . . 145 done, 191 to go . . .