that brown house

This morning we got up early to officially accept (and pay for) our shiny new furnace. It’s not actually turned on yet because we don’t have an electrical supply for it, but it should be ready when the electrical is.

We did get the air purifier option (attached to the right hand side in the photo), which hopefully will keep the air free of cat fluff and Steph’s lungs happy. The furnace installer also attached the missing vent to the water heater so we should be safe from the fumes from it now too.

In ancient news from Sunday, while I did some more sanding, Steph started patching the cracks in the plaster. It’s probably impossible to tell what’s going on from the picture, but the lack of visible cracks means it’s all fixed now, right?

Meanwhile, even longer ago and in the vaguely useful tips category: if you are ever trying to get painted-over screws out, I recommend the very small flathead screwdriver. You might think it is too tiny to get any leverage, but it makes up for it by being narrow and sharp enough that you can jab it all the way through the layers of paint so you are actually turning the screw, not just the paint.

The downside to this is that you end up destroying half the screws, and the ones that aren’t destroyed are still so covered in paint that they might as well be destroyed. A lot of the hardware really ought to have black screws, but it turns out to be really hard to buy black screws in most sizes—all you can find are brass and nickel. We’re going to try spray painting some normal screws black and see how that turns out.