This is the fourth and final installment on recent house projects.

The heating system install finally finished in January. When the guys ripped out the old system they discovered a crack in the furnace (can you say carbon monoxide leak), this meant it not only needed to be replaced, it had to be replaced. Now with the old furnace gone, there is a tremendous amount of space in the basement. Harry and I will need to fill in the concrete were the furnace and water heater were. We'll probably do that this spring.

In a previous post I complained about the boiler going out just before we went on vacation. This was due to a design flaw (or poor manufacture's recommendations), either way Agway came out this week and we discuss possible remedies for the problem. In the end we decide to move the exhaust vent. This will have two pluses and one minus. The pluses are the intake should no longer freeze causing the system to stop working, and the exhaust will no longer fog up the windows. These are things I didn't know to consider, having never had a non-chimney venting system before. Apparently, Agway was caught off guard by the window fogging issue, they didn't expect the system to put out that much exhaust, and mind you, this only happens on the cold days (below 15 degrees). The downside to moving the vent is that we'll now have a "hot" vent traversing the basement, and with the low ceiling, it might be low enough for someone to smack their head on if they aren't paying attention.

I also asked them to rework the intake vent inside the basement so that it wasn't going directly in front of the window -- a couple of elbows should easily take care of that.

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This is installment three of four.

Once the old heating system had been removed from the basement, I had a clear shot at installing some new lights. The first light was going near the breaker panel and the light switch was going to be at the end of the loop. I came up with a creative solution for leaving the switch at the end of the run, and beginning with the light by the breaker panel. It involved using a combination of 12/3 + ground and 12/2 + ground wire. Harry is a master electrician, so I ran my idea by him first. It turns out being creative and thinking outside the box (while good in my day job) is not such a good idea when doing electrical work. He was concerned with it being a non-standard approach; it would be too confusing for someone coming along after me. He convinced me to go ahead and make a direct run from the breaker panel to the switch, and then from there wire the lights in. I had wanted to avoid to cables going to the switch, because limited space, but it turned out not to be a big deal.

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This is installment two of four on recent house projects.

Oddly enough, the return loop from the second floor that caused us to make a hole in the closet wall also generated a need for us to access the crawl space under the small addition. It had been closed up by the home owner, and despite repeated attempts to learn why, we couldn't get it out of him. Well once we broke through his silence became immediately obvious. One of the foundation walls is caving in.

It appears there is a drainage problem and water is saturating the ground outside the wall freezing and unfreezing. This is causing too much pressure on the wall, which is causing it to push inward. Fortunately, this is a small addition, and it is the only thing support by this wall. It's not like the house is in jeopardy, but it will probably run in the thousands to get it fixed. I plan to have a foundation contractor quote the repair this spring.

Update: We were able to find a contractor who was willing to repair the wall for us at a very reasonable rate. They dug out around the foundation by hand so we didn't have a backhoe tear up our yard. I had them put rebar into the footing and it goes up to the grade. The columns that have the rebar were filled with mortar to re-enforce the wall. They used z-bar (horizontal rebar) between each layer of brick. They ended up replacing half of the back wall as well. On this wall they put a vent in to increase air flow and circulation in that part of the basement.

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This is a first post in a series of four dealing with the various house projects that fell out of having the heating system re-done.

To get heat to the second floor we had to run a 3/4" pipe up the wall in the living room (the feed side), and to get the loop back to the boiler we have to run a 3/4" pipe down through the small addition on the back of the house. In order to do this there was a section of house that had no access that we need to get in. Harry and I cut a hole in the wall to gain access to the space. Later we added a door to make it look like it's always been there. I say we, but in truth Harry did the bulk of the work; I mostly watched.

I wish I had taken more pictures of the process ... oh well.

The space is behind the small upstairs bedroom and the upstairs closet. It apparently used to be the overhang for the back porch, which no longer exists. We opt'd to create the portal in the closet where it would be less noticeable.

We are planning on painting it to match the rest of the trim in the closet.

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We were all in the back room playing cards. The birds were screaming and going crazy for no apparent reason. Then we heard the front door open and someone walking across the house. He said, "Have you heard about it?" "Kind of," I said, as he walked into the room. "Well he's dead; you know that?", "No," I said, straining to get the word out.

The room was silent; and everyone turned and looked at him. Finally someone spoke, "How did it happen?" He said,

I saw some people at Industrial; someone told me they saw an ambulance coming from my grandparent's house. So I got a ride to their house. The whole way there I just kept saying to myself, "God don't let anything happen to them." When we finally got there I went inside, and the house was empty. I walked into their bedroom, and there was blood on my grandmother's side of the bed. We immediately left for the hospital, the whole time I was thinking, "It's my grandmother." When I walked in to the hospital and saw her, I was so relieved. You know, the whole time, I never considered that it might be my granddad who was hurt. I didn't know what to think when she told me he was dead.

It has been almost a year since I started blogging, and I thought I would commemorate the occasion with a new website design (and name for that matter).

Welcome to stratus nine.

I've added a couple of content modules -- on the left side you'll find WOTD (word of the day), and a random image pulled from the photo album. On the right side there is a shout box. If you want to give a shout out then click the (randomly changing) title in the shout box, and a form will appear so you can enter a message.

I have also included links to my amazon.com and buy.com wish lists, so if you ever have a hankerin' to buy me something, this would be a good place to start.

I hope everyone enjoys the new design.

Ali and I had a great time at Sunday River. The only complaint was that it was a little on the cold side. A few days were below zero with a wind chill of negative 25. On those days we could only stay out for an hour at a time. Our hotel was great -- slope-side with a heated outdoor pool and hot tub. There is nothing like sitting outside in a hot tub when it's 0 degrees and snowing. Our room had a kitchenette, which allowed us to eat breakfast and lunch in the room and save a decent amount of money (hence the shot of ali in the grocery store).

We were able to ski most of the mountain (see the trail map for details) with the exception of two peaks which are only open on weekends and holidays. In spite of that there was still a lot of mountain to cover. It took upwards of an hour to traverse from one side to the other.

By the time we left on Friday I could barely walk (maybe too much skiing ... nah). On our way home we went to Freeport (home of LL Bean) and went shopping.

Despite the fact there were issues surrounding the vacation (before we left and when we got home) we had a great time. The afore mentioned events are worth mentioning, but I don't have time to include them in this post.

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