Tuesday, January 27, 2009

baby it's cold outside.....and inside

Well, this month (particularly yesterday) has been one for the record books for amount of money spent with nothing concrete to show for it. I finally took the Subaru in to the shop yesterday for it's overdue 60k mile service, which went well but was expensive, plus highlighted that we will need new brake pads and new tires soon. When I got home, I discovered that the house was at 64 degrees in the hall and 61 in the kitchen, despite the thermostat being set on 70 degrees. I was able to get a tech to come out on an after-hours call, and our furnace is shot. It's a 20-year-old furnace, with a certain blower part that was only used in that style of furnace, and even if they can get the part (which is unlikely) it would be $900 and extend the life of the furnace by just a few months to a year. So we're going to be putting in a new furnace as soon as they can get one ready and the parts fabricated, hopefully today or tomorrow.

Yesterday evening wasn't too bad, as if you shut the office door with two people, four dogs, and two gaming desktops inside the room was warm enough to be tolerable. I also was wearing a hat and had a heating pad on my lap, in addition to two of the border collies laying on my feet under the desk. The furnace tech guy was very nice and left us two space heaters to use until they can get our furnace installed, so one is downstairs keeping the kitty room at 60 degrees and the other is in our bedroom keeping it at 72 degrees. I moved the dog beds into the bedroom last night and had the dogs stay in with me - they would probably be fine at 45-50 degrees in their room, but that seemed unnecessary to me so they slept in my room. The borders stayed put but Phoebe did jump up and curl up against my back on the edge of the bed at some point, but since she didn't move and didn't go near Chris' side of the bed I let her be when I discovered her around 2:30am. I had moved the cat beds right near the heater in their room, and they were perfectly happy and meow-y this morning so they're doing fine.

It was 54 degrees in my kitchen this morning. Brrrr.

I really hope we'll get the new furnace installed today. I don't like being shivery in my own house, it's bad enough that I'm cold from the time I leave the house in the morning until I get back home due to the insufficient heating at work combined with a cold commute on the motorcycle. The new furnace will be much more efficient and will have a nice HEPA filter installed, so there are improvements to be made there, but the upfront cost for it is definitely a big chunk of change. I had planned to use some soon-to-expire stock options to finally buy a set of bedroom furniture, but it looks like that money will go to help pay for this new furnace instead. Oh well.

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