I am thankful for my warm house on this blustery winter morning! We had a brand new furnace put in our house before we moved in and we were still freezing cold and paying astronomical heating bills! And it wasn’t just that the air was cold, everything we touched was cold. So there were the furnace installers, and a couple more companies giving estimates. Three companies dealing with the heating of a house. NONE of them looked down or up the chimney. In March we heard crumbling in the chimney. we had the chimney cleaned and relined. He got a heaping wheelbarrow of soot out of it, plus some bricks. The furnace works like a charm with no additional radiators, which is what everyone else was trying to sell us. To me it’s like putting a new engine in the car and never looking at the muffler. I don’t know much about physics, but I do know that moving air doesn’t come from nowhere! so it was my smart husband who got up and looked down the chimney, just so you know. We are amazed at the difference.
Last year I wanted a mantle. When you have a fireplace you have this wonderful thing called a mantle. But just because you don’t have a fireplace doesn’t mean you can’t have mantle. So I bought a nice piece of shelving, a couple of trim boards , but I wasn’t excited about it. One day I said to Joel, “You know what I’m picturing?” And he knew it was the one we had in Toughkenamon. It was a rough piece of barn board about two inches thick and we sanded it down and rubbed boiled linseed oil/turpentine combination into it and that was it. so I started looking around on craigslist. Found something for no less than $75. and no more than $300. I called a carpenter friend and he said, he was interested but a two inch board would be very expensive, but to come over and we’d chat. That evening I had some plans fall through and I had to go past Lowe’s on my way home so I thought I would just look. For $9. bucks I hauled home an 8 foot piece of 10 inch decking, 2 inches thick! There was nicer wood, but this had beautiful lines with some streaks of yellow. So The Man hauled out his belt sander and gave it good sanding, softened up the edges and rounded the corners for me. I found some stain that I think I bought almost 20 years ago and slapped it on. Here are the results.
The raw board
and the finsihed board
When we get up and ‘Christmas ized’, I’ll take another picture!
