Competitive Freezing

Funny. I didn't realize that freezing to death in your own home was a competitive sport until recently. I read this post which I thought was cool because of the story behind it. Then, I had lunch with my sister, and she told me about some friends of hers who see how long they can go without turning on the heat in Boston. I might be mixing my stories, but I think November 1st was their minimum goal for this year. As far as my sister knew, it wasn't an issue of money or economy, but a competitive need to see if they could do it.

As for me, I don't have a target date. My goal is to go as long as possible without turning on the heat. Then, once the dirty deed is done, the goal is to run it as little as possible. For me, it is all about money. I could have had a nice European vacation for what we spent on heating the Devil Queen last winter.

So far, I haven't been tempted yet. However, this week is the first one that has actually been cold at night. Last night the temperature made it down to 48 degrees. According to the thermostat, it was a cool 60 degrees in the Devil Queen this morning. Tonight should be a real weenie shrinker though with low around 38 degrees. But the heat won't be coming on tonight. I'll just wear a sweat shirt if it gets nippy.

What is interesting is how much just being at home adds to the house's temperature. I've been closing the living room door to the drafty main hall this week. This segregates the thermostat and the living room, dining room, kitchen, and the bathroom/laundry from the rest of the house. That is about 756 square feet. Just by coming home and being there, the temperature will rise 1 degree within the first 30 minutes to an hour. If I cook and turn on most of the lights, you can add another couple of degrees over the evening. If you run the dishwasher and run the washer and drier too, you can bring the temperature up by five or six degrees by bedtime.

I'm thinking that if I get the rest of the storms up this weekend and re-hang the transom over the living room door that it ought to be possible to keep this part of the house pretty warm for a while, particularly if I use an electric space heater.
In any case, it ought to be an interesting experiment.

Battening Down the Hatches

The cold has been creeping in lately. This is to be expected just two weeks out from November, but I am not happy about it. Sunday, I managed to put up two storm windows which was one shy of my goal of three for the day. When your in-laws show up and ask if you want to go sailing on a sunny, blue skied afternoon, how can you say no? And, the sailing was great.

The storms should be a quick project in theory. Just sink six screws per storm and they are up. Sounds easy. However, these storms have been in storage for two or three years now and they're filthy. So, after they are wrestled out from under the back porch and matched to the correct window, I disassemble them and wash them down while being careful to not get bitten by a brown recluse or something equally nasty.

Really, the storms are not all that bad, but the windows are. Invariablely, while washing the windows, I discover all sorts of nasty bits I feel the need to take care of before the storms go up. I'm not going for a perfectly redone and restored window just now since we don't have that luxury, but these windows look so fucking bad you could just cry.

The side of the Queen that I am working on now is especially bad. The worthless ass-monkey "professional" painter not only painted this side of the house the wrong color, he also over-sprayed the shit out of these windows. Sure, as he said, you just take a razor and scrape them clean, but that takes time. And, stupid me, I thought the dumb bastard would be doing this as part of the job. Wrong, but you already knew that. At that point, I should have known better too. Oops! Just one more for the school of hard knocks and bruised balls.

As I'm scraping off the over-spray, I notice twenty or thirty places around the window trim that need caulking. So far I've been using one tube of caulk per window. I don't see this trend changing any. I'm hoping to put up four more storms this week, which I might manage if the weather holds. After that, I only have seven (five for the bay-window room, one for the master bedroom, and one for the laundry room) more to go before I'm finished. Who knows, it could happen.

An Open Letter to the Weather Gods

Dear Lords and Ladies of the High Heavens, Zeus, Thor, et al:

A little snow every now and again is fine at our latitude. Twice in March is kind of pushing the limits of acceptability, but it's alright. No hard feelings on that count, really.

The issue I would like to see addressed as soon as possible is the temperature. You see, it's been far too cold for far too long. Sure, it helps keep the bug population down in the spring, but it also keeps my electric bill in up in a low-earth orbit. In fact, my electric bill is killing me.

Now, to be fair, I have to take some responsibility for my predicament. No, I didn't get all the storm windows up this last year. Sure, the weather stripping on the doors (if they have any) sucks. And yes, I did chose to live in an old house which is by definition drafty.

But, at the same time, there are some mitigating factors which ought to be considered:

Storm Windows: While most of our storms are not up, roughly 50% of windows in the areas we use most do have storm windows. The other rooms are closed off and unused in hopes of saving some energy. That, and the house is too friggin' big for us. Besides, since the storms screw into the window trim, getting them on and off is a real pain. We're still waiting for some re-touch painting before we commit to mounting them. Forever.

Weather Stripping: Okay, there are no mitigating factors to consider on this one. I'm lazy.

Drafty Old House (I): I was young and stupid when I bought this wreck. I actually thought you could seal the bugger up at the time. Little did I know that there isn't enough blown insulation, Great-Stuff foam insulation, and weather stripping in the world to truly seal an old home. Perhaps dipping the house in resin like some insect or scorpion in a freakish natural science museum gift-shop would work, but I don't see that as a viable option.

Draft Old House (II): I was young and stupid when I bough this old wreck; I had no idea that it was a creature of pure evil. As a creature born of Hell, the Devil Queen shares many characteristics with its land of origin. Specifically, the Devil Queen is as cold as Hell's dark heart (see Dante's Inferno, Ninth Circle if you don't believe me). In accordance to the Laws of Thermodynamics, "it is observed that temperature differences in a system lead to heat flows from the warmer to the colder parts of the system." As such, since Hell exists outside the laws of the limited, physical universe and will presumably remain cold for as long a it might exist, the Devil Queen will remain a cold, heat-sink in our world for as long as it exists. No amount of insulation will uttimetely keep the house warm. On the other hand, it's quite nice during an Arkansas summer.

Of course, there are factors completely beyond my control. The fact that our corporate masters increased electric rates last year has not helped. Jacking up the price of diesel to over $3.40 per gallon at the same time was not fair either. And, best of all, our corporate masters couldn't care less. Sacrificing a hecatomb in their honor just doesn't make an impression. Beseeching? Imploring? Yeah, good luck on that.

High Lords and Ladies of Heavens, if you could send some righteous storms or a well-placed bolt from the blue their way, I'd be much obliged.

So, Mighty Lords and Ladies of Heavens, I am left with no recourse anywhere else in this world. You are my only hope. I beseech thee: let the days be warm and the nights cool, so that I might turn off my bloody heat pump. Amen.

Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, or Less is More

If I were to attempt a concise summary, it might go something like this: "Refuse prevents the refinishing of the dining room floor," or, even better than that, "What is all of this shit?"

Really, what is it? Why have I gone to such great length to keep it with me until now only to toss it into the trash last night with a curse? After only three hours of intensive labor and soul searching, I have found my dining room floor. And, now that I've cleared the deck for action, I'm going to spend the weekend outside painting window sashes and hanging storm windows. Can you see why this whore of a house isn't finished?

We're supposed to have a full week of blue sky and sun, so I figure this may be my last chance to get the storm windows up. That way, when February rolls around, my frozen ass won't be handing over the better part of a paycheck to the electric company every month.

I've decided that less is definitely more. Owning a room full of thirty years of shit in cardboard boxes, stacked to the ceiling as though placed there by mischievous poltergeists, is bad mojo. Try it sometime if you don't believe me. I'll bet serious money that you will eventually find yourself raving alone in a dark, cold house saying shit like, "Why??? You have got be kidding me! Shit! Shit! Shit! What is all of this? Cthulhuflagen, Yog-Sothoth , goat with a thousand spawn flibrishermagagiagiiii!"

Not pretty, is it?

Anyhow, even if the floor isn't finished yet, we have been at work. First, we may have painting assistance lined up to work until the old whore house is finished. And, there is allegedly a plumber coming Saturday to make a bid on Plumbing Remediation 2.0.

Wish us luck. And, if Mars is in opposition and Saturn is crossing Orion (and no rain), maybe I'll even take some damn pictures of what we've been up to here at the Devil Queen. A novel idea, no?

Ventilating One Window at a Time

I've been spending more time on my art lately than the house. I think the balance is getting ready to swing back the other way though.

The electrician still has not made it out to the Devil Queen to check on the AC so no official word on what went wrong.

While the weather has been gorgeous (minus that veiled threat of winter's imminent approach), the house stays much cooler if you can open more than one window and a screen door. Technically, you could open more but since they don't have screens this isn't too attractive of an option. Think Hitchcock's "The Birds" except with moths, wasps, mosquitoes, and feral cats. Sure, it would be pretty exciting, but I don't know that I'd call that fun.

You'd think that installing a storm window would be a quick, simple procedure. Simple, yes. Quick, no.

The storm windows we have came with the Devil Queen and they were probably installed in the 1980's. They are metal, aluminum I'd guess. They are coated or painted in a dark brown-gray which isn't terribly attractive, but I've seen much worse.

We call them storm windows, but they are a screen/storm combination. The top panel is a fixed window while the bottom glass panel can be raised or lowered over a screen. This setup negates any benefit you'd get from using the top double-hung window. And, unlike traditional storm windows which hang on brackets and are fastened to the frame with a hook or similar device, these screw directly into the exterior window frame. This is more invasive than I'd like, but they do seal well. Come January, the season of infernal drafts (remember your Dante, Hell is cold), this will be very important. I'd personally like to be able to sit in my living room without my clothes whipping about me in a stiff wind.

And, another important consideration is we can't afford to replace these, so they will have to do for the foreseeable future.

Now, there are several reasons why it's taking so long to get these buggers back in the full-coverage position.

1) They have been stored under the back porch for roughly a year and a half. The windows were custom made for the house, so you have to sort through the stack with a tape measure to find one that will fit the particular window you are covering. The widths vary between 22 inches (the three windows that make the front bay window), random 27 inches and the standard 28 inch ones.
2) Since they have been in outdoor storage, they are filthy. Mostly dirt, saw dust, and general filth but there are some suspicious stains probably left by rodents, dead bugs, living, bugs, spider webs, et cetera.
3) To clean the windows, you have to remove the lower, sliding window pane.
4) Once you've cleaned the storm, you have to clean the exterior of the window itself. This includes scraping paint over-spray off too. Here is one tip, it comes off much easier if you spray the window down with Windex first and then scrape it clean with a razor. I don't know if it is the solvent action or if it lubricates the surface like shaving cream or what. In any case, the paint just glides off.
5) Since our genius Zombie Painter #2 did such a fabulous job of painting the windows shut, I have to cut and pry the windows open.

After performing all of the steps above, I can finally install the window. If I'm lucky, there is just a little bit of daylight left when I finish.

With the exception of the storm that fits over the transom of the original back door, I have installed all the storm windows accessible from the back porch. Now, to install the remaining storm windows, the process will become even more complicated. I'll have to add the following steps:

1) Re-glaze the window panes.
2) Touch-up, paint, or re-paint the window before proceeding with the list above.

Again, none of this is rocket science, but it is time consuming and boring. I'm not a fan of either. I'll probably do Gideon's windows next and then the living room and dining room windows. These are the draftiest ones in the house, so I'd like to get them finished first.

One additional benefit to getting the storms up is that it has really cut down on the number of bugs in the house. Gotta love that.