Projects around the house

I'm sitting in the withdrawing room in front of a roaring fire...even though it's gonna be just under 90 degrees today. I got a wood pellet insert for my fireplace and it has to "cure" much like a cast iron pan does, so I've got to run it nearly all day today. It'll most likely be much hotter in here today than outside, so I'll probably get a lot of painting done. Here's a photo of the new insert:

 



It was a fairly expensive investment, so I won't be paying anyone to fix my sprinklers this year, which means it probably won't get done. Fireplaces are pretty inefficient at heat, so in a climate like this it really pays to have an insert installed in existing fireplaces. So this little guy drops these tiny pellets into a dish and then burns them. The pellets are esssentially made of super compacted saw dust. They burn very efficiently. This way I won't have to continually load wood like I do with my woodstove. I've still got that in the dining room. I load up the top with pellets and it'll burn up to about 40 hours without having me touch it again, which means I will not be going outside in my pj's at 6am to gather wood that I forgot to bring in the night before. It also has a remote, so I can set the temperature I want the house to be, and voila, it stays at that temperature as long as it has pellets.... and electricity. That's the downside. If the electricity goes out, so does the pellet stove. The machinery inside needs electricity to run. But that's ok, I have a woodstove that doesn't need electricity, so I'm well covered.

And I'll be choosing a different picture for the mantle....that one's a little small.

I finished sanding and re-staining my deck before this last fire we went on. Here's a couple pics:

I've been working on painting the house and haven't gotten very far, but yesterday I painted one of the walls yellow (as opposed to the boring white primer that I've been doing so far) and am excited to get the other walls painted. It's a bigger job than it looks like. It has to be cleaned, the walls sanded if the paint is peeling or the wall is in bad shape, primer put on....twice on the bad walls, and then painted with the final color....twice I'm thinking, to make sure it's a good true color. Plus wasp nests need to be sprayed and removed, which takes about as much guts as killing spiders. I'm allergic to bees, but apparently not wasps and hornets, but I'd rather not take my chances. There's quite a few wasp nest around my house. I sprayed a few and today I'm going to grow the balls to scrape them off the house.

So here's one of the back walls after I've scraped the paint, sanded and started to apply primer. This is the worst wall I think. You can see the old color is a pale yellow. I really like yellow as a house color but I wanted it to be a happy, warm yellow. That required a little more brightness and just a touch of orange. Like the sun really. When I painted the wall yellow, I was a little shocked and nervous with how bright it was, but it's already growing on me and I'm very excited to get the rest of the house painted.

This little back room is the addition where the jacuzzi is housed, and it needs some shutters. Those will come shortly. After I paint the walls, I'll have to go back and sand, prime and paint all the trim. I'd love to get it all done before the rainy season comes, but usually fire season doesn't end until the rains start, so it'll be difficult.

There's a small tint of green in certain sections of my lawn. I guess it's not completely dead.

Oh, so a withdrawing room: came from the day back when people lived in castles and the women were proper. After a meal, the men would go into the study or whatever to smoke and drink, which wasn't proper for a lady, so the ladies went into the withdrawing (or "drawing") room to drink tea and gossip. There's no smoking in my withdrawing room, but there's certainly the occasional glass of wine. I guess I haven't completely decided what to call it.

Well, the heat from the pellet stove is starting to get a little uncomfortable so I'm going to sign off and work my way outside to get some painting done.