The Return Of Calm? Not Really

Now that Xynthia is a more than a week behind us and the power is back on, and now that the colonoscopy is done with good results, you'd think we'd be relaxing a bit. You would be wrong. We're up to our eyeballs in chores and stuff that needs doing before Ken leaves for two weeks in North Carolina on the eighteenth.

The skies are back to normal now. Thank goodness.

First of all, we are proceeding with the attic conversion. That means meeting with the contractor and viewing/selecting materials at a supply place over in Tours. In addition, the guy that will do the electrical and heating installation in the attic is coming over on Wednesday to install a water heater for us. We were very lucky to have obtained an almost-new 300 liter tank (about 75 gallons) for the house (thanks K & J!).

The current tank is seventeen years old and holds only 200 liters (about 50 gallons). On one hand, we're worried that the thing will just die one day soon. On the other hand, we frequently run out of hot water, especially when we have guests. Let me explain: we are on a circuit that automatically turns on the water heater at night when the electric rates are much lower, and turns it back off during the day when the rates are high. We often override this feature during the day to heat up water, and it ends up costing us a lot more than it should.

With the larger tank, we're hoping we will have enough hot water so that we don't have to pay higher rates to heat it during the day. Also, since the heater is much newer, it may be more efficient from the start. We'll see how that goes.

We also have to prepare for the attic work to begin, which means cleaning up the attic (removing some junk that's up there and all the cardboard that's lining the floor) and moving a bunch of furniture and stuff beneath the work area into the garage. But we need to clean the garage up a bit by taking some things that have been piling up in there to the dump. And, since the garage will have furniture in it temporarily, we'll have to park the car in the carport outside, which means cleaning out the remains of this year's wood pile (which is not much since we're near the end of wood burning season).

And there's still a lot to do in the yard once the weather gets a little warmer.

Arrrgh! I'm exhausted from just thinking about it all.