Lovely surprise!

We had a fantastic surprise today!  Esther Ferguson dropped off our house numbers! What a wonderful, brilliant gift, from the previous family that lived here.  Wow- they look fantastic- I'm itching to install them- hopefully tomorrow after I ready the basement for the secondary suites inspection!

If you'd like to see more of Duncan and Esther's metal creations, click here: http://metalworkbyduncan.wordpress.com/

Baseboards, baseboard heaters, web boxes, guardrails and other details.

I've been quite delinquent in posting of late! It's getting harder and harder to post, as I spend ever spare minute unpacking, cleaning, moving, and installing things. There is still a long, long list of things to do.

Last weekend, we had our first true test of how comfortable the house is when the temperature goes down to -20 C.  It did fairly well- never dropping below 16 C inside without any heat on.  On a sunny day, it would hit 22 C inside, again without supplemental heating. We mostly used the wood fireplace to get the house comfortable. I had also just barely wired up the baseboard heaters in our bedrooms. Phew!

Got these baseboard heaters installed just in time.

Clifton configuring the web-box to our internet line.

One of the nice things is that Clifton from Great Canadian Solar hooked up the web-box to the inverter, so we can view/post our daily power generation!  You can see it by clicking here. 

So, we'll endeavour to keep everyone posted on how well the system is working. 

Another milestone was that we finally finished all the guardrails! Yay! So, here's Dan loading up the very last guardrail for the stairs!

Now it is much safer running up and down. Hooray!

My Bike Commute!

I managed to bike home from work in just over 30 minutes! That's not even 3 times longer than my old commute. I hugged the top of the river valley and didn't dive down into the valley itself, and I peddled moderately- not full tilt fast.  This was faster than taking the bus! When I biked the trails in the valley, my commute time ballooned to 49 minutes- partly because I'm outta' shape and the hills were killing me. My goal: by next summer, get the river valley trail time to 40 minutes! 

 

Get the fire goin'!

It's now cold enough to start up our wood fireplace. Last night, it was -8 C, and -11 C the night before.

The house has been comfortable on the loft and 2nd floor.  It was +23 C on the loft floor and +21C on the 2nd floor, just from our solar gain/heat retention. We haven't turned on any electric baseboard heaters yet, partly because I haven't had time to wire them up! But a bit chilly on our main floor where we sleep, only getting to be 16 C. Serena made me get one of our plug-in heaters for the bedroom a couple nights ago.

So, we started up our wood fireplace and were amazed how much light if gave off from the flames. Adar pulled up his rocking chair to it, to read by the fire.