Home Improvement

The past month or so has been busy with improvements to my home address. I'll start with the upstairs renovations. I had the room worked over and it is now livable. The wood paneling is gone and replaced with drywall. The floor is been redone with a dark colored laminate and looks way better. I did have some issues with the corners being way out of level, but got the corners close and pushed the trim down far enough to hide the flaw. The track lighting does an excellent job of illuminating the room also. The paint turned out real well, the vet tech did an excellent job of picking the color scheme and doing the painting. Once all that was done, the long dresser and bed fit in the room with room to spare. I was beginning to worry that those two items would take up a great deal of the floor space and not make the room much of a bedroom. My dad was in the "only good for a walk in closet" camp, but the room turned out to be way more than adequate for that. The added benefit of all this is that the room I put carpet in two summers ago is now freed up for couches and dressers that were cluttering up the downstairs a bit. I may have only renovated 150 square feet, but likely gained twice that in overall space. I am now using room next to the bathroom as a type of staging area for my work clothes and that frees up the laundary room so nicely. I don't have to trip over and lean around work shoes now to wash my hands.

I also bought my parents outdoor wood furnace and had that installed to heat my house with. It definitely keeps my house nice and warm now. I am not sure if I am burning too much wood or not, but the electric bill should be cheaper. I added up the bills for the year and am averaging about 165 a month for electric in this house. That average includes a low of 50 for one of the summer months, but I don't remember the high from that run of bills. With the four grand I spent on getting the furnace and installation, it may take some years to be ahead overall. I'm not really concerned about that though, the electric furnace didn't really do a good job keeping the house warm. The wood furnace is.

I also went ahead and bought a new TV for my big living room downstairs. I decided to move my other TV upstairs and bought a 50 inch plasma for downstairs. The only issue is that I now should buy some better cables and a decent DVD player for the TV. The five year old thirty dollar DVD player from walmart isn't playing in color on my new TV, so a change is to be in effect.

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