A new home for our cars!

After a ton of stress and calling the city of St. Paul almost every day to figure out if we need a permit and getting a million different answers, we finally got it together! We knew that we needed a driveway before the ground froze and really should have started the process earlier. We are on a road that has a snow emergency on both sides and on the side street. We basically would have to park the next block down on snow emergencies, which would have been just plain awful! Luckily after many phone calls we got an answer and approval to our plan and began digging out a driveway and the place where our garage should go once the ground thaws this spring. We also got the pea gravel area cleared and the cracking cement work by our patio doors removed. I cannot wait until spring to get our yard put back together again!

Works in Progress

We have a lot of little works in progress right now. I think I am ready to move my focus to the guest room, because it would be nice to be able to have visitors stay in style! After a weekend at a B&B I feel the need to get that room up to standards! Plus, I love decorating and I am starting to run out of places to decorate!

Over labor day weekend one of the most important pieces to getting the guest room in the right direction was putting on a door! There was never a door on the room, but we found a paneled door in the shed and Nick and his dad cut it down, while I supervised of course ;-) Obviously I didn't supervise, but I did praise them for their hard work!

I am hoping to get the guest room painted before November rolls around. The garden ended earlier than I thought it would because of the earliest snow me and Nick have ever experienced (the last time it snowed this early we weren't even born!), so I should be able to find some time one long weekend if I take a Friday off.

We are also in the process of getting the driveway space dug out, finishing getting handles on the cabinets and hopefully getting the laundry room rearranged and vented properly. So many projects, so little time! Have I mentioned that there are still a few random boxes to unpack! Oops!

95 is the way to be.

We just purchased a new, high efficiency furnace. It's incredibly slick, and actually cost a lost less than I had originally thought. The cost was around $4000, and since it is energy efficient, we will be receiving 30% of that cost back from the federal government in the form of tax credits. Pretty slick, I'd say.

Our old furnace was a beast. It was a modern furnace, but 26 years old. A furnace filter usually needs to be replaced once a year. The filter we had was never replaced. Ever. 26 years of dust, hair, and anything else airborne was still in that filter. I'm glad I never saw it when Genz-Ryan removed it.

In it's place sits a brand new, 95% efficiency Lennox furnace. The main points about the new furnace is that it is quiet, uses a lot less energy, and has a continually running fan to filter the air inside the house. The fan is a huge plus, since we opted for the improved filter that removes 95% of everything foreign object in the air. The fan is running the air through the filter even when the furnace is not on. Since Hilary has allergies, this should reduce her symptoms when they flare up.

High efficiency furnaces has some interesting quirks to them though. A high efficiency furnace does not use the normal chimney stack in a home and the intake and exhaust are vented out of the side of the home. Our vents are near the garden, one pointing down and the other pointing straight out. In addition, they also creates condensation in the intake and exhaust, which would normally flow back into the furnace. Thankfully, they have to redirect it to a drain. In Winifred manor, there is no floor drain so a sanitary pump was installed to pump the water into a standard opening in the sewer pipe. It's rather neat, since there is now a clear hose full of water running up through the ceiling of the basement.

Finally, we have a brand new thermostat, which is operated by a touchscreen. It's pretty fancy, and we will be saving even more energy when I program the thing. That is a project coming soon.

So now I'm sitting here in a nice, warm house. I'm not even sure the furnace is running right now. It probably is, but the thing is so quiet I have to put my hand up to the vent to feel if air is passing through. Oh... Yep, it's running. Would it be crazy to wish for winter to really see the thing in action?

Putting the tomatoes and peppers to bed

The early end of the planting season forced me to pick the rest of my tomatoes and peppers before temperatures drop below freezing this weekend. I spent all yesterday morning picking green tomatoes and ended up with an entire brown paper bag full! It is a shame they couldn't ripen on the vine. Luckily they will still ripen in the bag, and hopefully they didn't get too cold already. I also picked all the peppers that were left. I am going to dry them to use in soups for the winter. Does anyone want a bag of green tomatoes? I seriously have a ridiculous amount!

I don't know what I am going to do without my garden to occupy my time! I can bring my two herbs in but that isn't the same! I guess I need to start planning a timeline for next year's garden! I learned a lot from this years and hope to have so many more vegetables next year!

I should have kept track, but I definitely produced a ton of tomatoes! Each plant did really well, except the pots produced far less. Next year all the tomatoes go in the ground.

Sadly my pumpkins are nowhere near being ready, so next year I will need to plant much earlier. I think I need to try more gourds and squash next year. I will have to cultivate the area better though.

I think I will also diversify my peppers. I had all cayennes until the very end where the bell peppers finally produced.

Next year I want a ton more herbs. Hopefully the oregano and rosemary I have can last inside until next spring.

Until next year, I am putting away my vegetable garden tools. I still have a lot to do to prepare the yard for winter, so this isn't the last you will hear about our fantastic garden!

Chirstmas comes early!

I don't know where the season of Autumn went, but it went right from being Summer to feeling like it was Winter! For the past week and a half our house has been freezing! The minute I get home it is bathrobe, slippers and blankets for me along with a nice cup of hot chocolate!

Luckily for us, Christmas came early, with a present to ourselves: a brand new, high efficieny, energy saving, non-smelly, safety approved, furnace! The house is now toasty warm, and of course, now it feels more like fall than winter outside, but we can manage ;-)

I am sure that Nick can write all about what our shiny new furnace does and all the fancy bells and whistles attached to it. We had it installed by Genz Ryan and they did a fantastic job and actually arrived on time, unlike most contractors! I let Nick write more about it though!

Decorating!

Now that summer has wound down I have had the chance to do my favorite thing: decorating! Here are some of the newest, decorative additions to our house!

$50 richer and less one shed

Goodbye old shed!!

We listed our tool shed on Craig's List so that we could prepare for our driveway so that we can finally have off street parking (which after getting two parking violations, is more than necessary, grrr). We knew there was no way we could move the shed ourselves, and it was inconviently right where the parking pad needed to go. We decided to list it for $75 plus you haul it, and got a staggering 43 offers! We had no clue that anyone would be willing to pay us and try to move that beast. We ended up having someone see if and he offered $50 so we took it because this shed would take a lot of work to get moved.

This morning he came by and three hours, part of the tree down, a trip to Menards and a lot of creative manuevering, the shed was off our hands!

I think we got the better deal ;-)