Our New Old House

That October chill is in the air and that means it’s time to light the furnace. When I went through the house with the home inspector, he made sure to light the furnace and check for carbon monoxide. However, when we took the thermostat off to remove the paneling around it, we disconnected the wires and haphazardly reconnected them wrong. It was August and it was hot and we didn’t think about bothering to test it. The old Honeywell thermostat looks like it’s from the 60s or 70s anyway, so today Brandon bought a new one. It’s also a Honeywell brand.

When we read the instructions and took the old thermostat off the wall, however, we ran into a problem. The instructions are written for thermostats with wires that are already labeled with letters, or are at least connected to the plate that’s labeled. Our thermostat plate and wires were not labeled. In fact, when I stripped back some of the insulation cloth to give us some more slack to work with, I discovered a third wire that had been purposely left unattached. Anyway, rather than try to hook these things up and test them the Tim the Tool Man way (flip the switch and see if it sparks) I looked around at some other people’s blogs to see what they’d encountered.

I found Kevin Freitas’ blog in which he explained that he’d had the exact same problem with the exact same old thermostat as ours! Unfortunately, our wires didn’t really look like his wires, but with the information he provided, we made an educated guess and nobody got zapped!

Here’s our old thermostat.

Here are the wires we weren’t sure how to match up. We have a red, a white, and a black.

Here’s the plate they were originally connected to. Only the red and black wires were connected. The white wire was buried inside the outer insulation.

Brandon hooked up the red one to the screw labeled “R” and the black one to “W.”

Zoot looked on, secretly hoping Brandon would get zapped.

We kept Kevin’s blog close at hand to refer to (it’s up on the screen of Brandon’s laptop.)

Getting the screws nice and tight:

When it was all hooked up, we set the temperature, flipped the circuit back on, and turned the thermostat on to “heat” and guess what? It did!!! The lovely blue glow you see in this picture is the furnace flame!

Now we can be toasty warm.

Last night I wanted to see if I’d left the owner’s manual inside the fireplace, so I opened up the glass door and saw THIS!!!

This praying mantis had made itself nice and cozy inside our fireplace! It’s that time of year when mantids (the correct plural form of mantis – I looked it up!) are laying their eggs then finding warm places to hang out until they, well, die. This one has been eating all the other little bugs that have made their way down our chimney. Fortunately, our fireplace is sealed with an airtight door. Unfortunately, it looks like our mantis friend is doomed. We can’t keep it alive in the house all winter (they typically don’t live longer than a few months in the fall anyway) and if we leave it in the chimney it will die when we light the first fire. It seemed to be on its last legs anyway, so hopefully nature will take its course and we’ll find it has perished before we have to dispose of it alive.

Nice to know we have these beneficial insects in our yard anyway!

I know we’re not even to Halloween yet so it’s crazy to be thinking about Thanksgiving, but gosh darnit, I need to thank some people right now! It can’t wait!

That’s why I’ve decided to create a Thank You page on my blog. You can get to it by using the navigation links on the right hand side of the page, and I’ll also link to it from my main home page. Any time I add a little thank-you note to someone who’s done something nice for me, I’ll also write a little post notifying you all that a new entry has been added to my Page O’Thanks. (Still trying to come up with a snappy title for it; suggestions welcome!)

CLICK HERE TO SEE MY THANK YOU PAGE

Here’s a brief glimpse into my day:

Me: I stripped paint today!

My friend Brian: Who is paint and why did he/she let you strip him/her?

Have I mentioned I love my friends?

But back to the point, I did strip paint today. I bought a bottle of Citri-Strip months ago, but I’ve never stripped paint before. I decided to try working on the windows outside because it’s October now and soon it will be too cold to work on the outside projects. Unfortunately, by the time I gathered all my supplies and got the ladder level enough to work on, the sun was going down. But I just wanted to see how the stuff worked so I applied some to a side window and waited the 30 minutes recommended on the bottle. 30 minutes wasn’t enough to really get a full layer of paint off, so I did a larger area and waited an hour. That took off quite a bit more. Here are pictures:

My test area ended up kinda big for a test area, but what’s the worst that could happen? It’s already paint I want to remove.

Safety first, people!

The directions on the bottle recommend a scraper like this:

But I had more luck with a razor blade scraper that I made sure had been dulled on a previous project so it wouldn’t gouge the wood. I wouldn’t recommend this for anything delicate, but on this straight, solid piece of seasoned wood with at least four thick layers of paint, it was a real time saver.

After an hour it looked kind of bubbly and shriveled.

So I started scraping.

It took off one good solid layer of paint, but that’s all. Incidentally, the wood trim on my house used to be slate blue, kinda nice!

It got dark and I had to pack up and go inside, so I thought I’d see how the chemical stripper worked on interior paint. Rather than just test some random spot, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and take care of a problem we’d been having ever since we moved in.

Our bathroom door has been painted with so many layers of goopy paint that it will no longer close. I truly believe that the lady living here before us never really closed her bathroom door because she lived alone. We have two VERY nosy cats, however, who just can’t wait their turn, so a properly closing bathroom door is a MUST.

I applied a layer to the inside edge of the door:

And the doorway:

This was interior latex paint, so 30 minutes was plenty of time for it to work:

Again, the plastic scraper wasn’t quite satisfactory.

The razor blade worked much better.

See???

After I’d taken two layers off, I used a coarse scouring pad to dig out the corners and scrape the edges clean.

Then I used a rag with mineral spirits and wiped down all the surfaces I’d scraped. I didn’t go all the way down to the bare wood because after I took two layers of paint off, the bathroom door was able to close! It was getting late so I called that a step in the right direction.

Brandon knows someone who’s going to loan us a heat gun to try taking some of the paint off. There are so many layers of paint on everything here that if the heat gun works, I’ll probably use it on the first couple layers and then use chemical stripper to get the rest really clean.

One final note:
The Citri-Strip claims to be a lot more friendly to the user because it doesn’t give off the harsh fumes that other paint strippers do. In fact, it has a really pleasant citrus scent. Don’t let that fool you, though! It still gives off fumes that can be dangerous when it’s used indoors. I didn’t even realize I wasn’t getting enough ventilation until I started feeling lightheaded when I was working on the bathroom. I opened a window and everything was fine, but it definitely snuck up on me.

But I did learn that I really enjoy stripping and I do plan to spend a lot more time doing it!