It's snowing.

They'll prolly blame it on da lake... 😟

I blame it on being 25 degrees when I woke up.

I'm too far west for the lake effect stuff. That tends to hit east of me. We get an inch, they get a foot.

Grass is cut. I did not keel over. 🌫

I was gonna go bother the folks at the local fireplace store but they're closed on Tuesdays.

I want to add wood heat to my house. Even if it's a little cast iron stove in the basement. I've always planned on wood boiler radiant heat in the barn whenever I get around to building that, and would run lines and heat exchanger to tie the house in as well. But that's a $10k+ job and out of reach right now.

Other options are a wood burning fireplace insert upstairs - I'd have to knock out a small section of wall between living room and garage but where the existing chimney for the water heater is forces the fireplace location off the center line of the wall. Or it eats up square footage of the living area and I've only got 800 to start so I really don't want to give up any. I could do a forced air add-on furnace in the basement but that too is pushing $10k and I really don't see a good option for where to run a chimney. I spose the water heater could get a powered exhaust out the sill plate like the furnace has and maybe there'd be enough space in the existing chimney to run a liner to the basement.

My sister had a wood insert put in her new house and says the last two winters the only gas they used was for stove, water heater, and clothes dryer. A friend of mine has a cast iron stove in the basement and says his gas bills are under $50/mo in the winter. A neighbor has a wood burning furnace tied into hvac and also heats his water in the winter.

I need to talk to the fireplace people and see what my options and actual costs are. I'm hoping to remodel the kitchen in the spring and can give up a small half wall section to make a cavity to run the stove pipe from the basement.

Bravo MAC, Bravo =d>

Pedro does our lawn service & snow removal. 🇨🇮


TWENTY SEVEN !! [ram27bat]

Damn, can you just cut a hole on an outside wall and build the fireplace and chimney outside..?? 😕

No good place to do that. I'd have to eliminate a window.

Wood stove in the basement could exhaust through block wall and up along the side of the house, through the eave/roof. That would be easiest but least efficient.

800sq ft house not a lot of options for placement and the existing mechanicals are in the way of most of them. Even doing the living room/garage knockout needs two outlets and a water line moved.

That's why I want to bother the people who do this for a living. Maybe they'll have ideas. If not, just gonna have to wait until I can afford the wood boiler. Even that, I need to check county building codes. They cracked down on wood boilers several years ago wanting them installed 500ft from a residence or something ridiculous like that.

Looked at building codes. Would require a smokestack 22ft or 2ft greater height than the tallest point of an occupied building whichever's higher on a boiler if it's less than 300ft from a residence or 150 ft from another non occupied buildling.

So that's out until I have a barn that can hide that eyesore. Otherwise I'll just have an outhouse looking thing with a 22ft tall smokestack sitting in the middle of my empty lot.

Snow is sticking. About 2" so far and still coming down.

It'll melt tomorrow sposeda be 40s

forecast calls for mid 80's rest of the week...over night lows in high 40s - low 50s...

so shorts n T during daylight hours and sweats at night...wardrobe getting stretched earlier this year...

wife will prolly gripe about doing laundry more frequently and the gas bill rising due to gas dryer and water heater running more...

I bought way too much Halloween candy.

I didn't buy any.. wasn't home... 😟

Nor I......

Hate to say it but Halloween in our subdivision is so crazy that we don’t give out candy anymore. As far as I can tell, people drive in from all over and it’s a constant flow of people for a couple of hours. Our high (…or low, depending on your pov…) point was when we spent close to $300 and completely ran out of candy. Had to take from our kids’ bags to finish the night.

These days we leave before the deluge, eat an early dinner then go to a movie. Try to get home around 9-ish when 98.2% of the TorTers are gone.

Yah, I know, grumpy old people…. 🌫

Yet another reason I couldn't ever see myself living in a subdivision.

Did drop off the boy at his friends house after school so he could gather candy from the neighborhood there. Just picked him up and he had a full pillow case. Probably 20lbs if not more.

You better confiscate all the resees and snickers... Mom used to say they all had razor blades in them... 😟

Thirty NEIN

Ditto. I bought about 9 lbs of it. Variety packs of stuff. New neighborhood for me so I didn't know the amount of Halloween kid traffic would come around. The house is set back a bit from the road and sidewalk so kids probably ain't gonna walk down driveway and knock on the door (understandable) even though its a safe residential area. It was kinda chilly (chance of frost tonight) so I wasn't gonna sit at the end of the driveway to hand it out. Maybe I should get a small fire pit thingy that I can drag around for things like this (shrug). Could have cooked some hot dogs and smores or sumptin while sitting there. Hindsight is 20/20.

Instead I put a lawn chair on the sidewalk and a large bowl of candy with a note "Take what you want but don't be greedy." I still have about half of it left. As long as the kids had a good time, that is all that matters.

Mental note: buy a portable fire pit thingy. It has multiple uses and I can get free scrap oak hardwood from work to feed it.