More than anything, it'll be nice to finally start to reclaim the house, which has been a disaster area for the last six weeks. I've started to work on the backyard, which was a sludgy gray mess, and now -- as you can see from the pic below -- looks like the surface of Mars:
In this little corner of Maryland, our soil is crammed with layers of shale, which get chewed up any time you push a shovel in the ground, and break off in enormous chunks. You can pick up the big stuff, but no matter how much you scoop up, you'll keep finding big pieces of it for weeks, as if it were burrowing to the surface on its own. Which it probably is.
As for the inside, everything we removed from the basement and crawlspace is still crammed in the spare bedroom, my old office, the front parlor, and dining room. The rest of the house is covered in dust from all the cutting and drilling.
But there's progress. Here's the space in the basement, for example, that I cleared out -- and painted white -- all ready to receive the heating/cooling unit:
And here it is as of today, with the unit squatting in place and the ductwork fitted almost perfectly into the space:
And then, of course, there's still this darn thing sitting in the boiler room, ready to be taken apart and taken out:
Typical of my luck, we discovered the doggone thing was not actually empty, even though our furnace stopped burning any fuel from it late last Spring. Apparently there's a clog in the pipe that funnels fuel from the tank to the boiler. So we've got to figure out a way to pipe the remaining fuel -- about 70 to 100 gallons, we think -- from our tank over to our neighbor's tank, about eighty feet away. We can't move it out until then, or it's considered a hazard.More later. Here's hoping we're up and running this afternoon!
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