Busy Day: Furnace, Insulation and Peaches

Last week of August, two months before the weather starts to turn, we got our shiny new gas furnace installed, replacing the old sooty oil furnace. Rakeesh (the plumber), a type-A maniac from Guyana with four cell phones strapped to his belt like magazine cartridges, and his crew of three men, drove up at 11:30 am, just after the street cleaning vacuum truck passed by. It took 4 guys to unload the Burnham Furnace out of the van. They disconnected the old pipes and reinstalled bigger pipes to code.

The van that the boiler was delivered in. Notice how all the guy's homeland is represented on the graphics.

We disconnected the rest of the radiators on the second floor and moved the stove, so that I could demo the parapet wall and Joe Taco could look at the framing job that had to be done in that section of the house.

The parapet is the money pit of the job. It's where all the water from the roof drains onto and has been a problem area for a while, judging from the leaks on the floor below. We decided that the whole section needs to be redone; re-framed, re-insulated, re-plastered and concreted. But since we are technically starting from scratch, we get to redesign the area, which means we will be putting in French doors in the place of the windows, making the little parapet a lovely outdoor cafe on the second floor, as well as becoming the smoking section for our guests, when we have parties.

Last weekend, Harley and I also began putting up the first layer of insulation.

before

and after insulation.

At the end of the day we gave the plumbers some peaches picked from our second harvest. We also realized that to keep the peaches from getting out of control, we need to pick a bowl full everyday.