The House Makes My Nose Run

And not because I'm allergic to anything, but because it's so damn cold. As with many old houses, our house has NO insulation, and many of the windows are original or were replaced about 30 years ago, so there is nothing energy efficient about the house.

When we redid the kitchen we made sure to insulate the crap out of it, and we plan to do so with each room we get to, but still 90% of the house isn't insulated and there is a LARGE empty attic that fills with very very very cool air and keeps the house cold. Conversly, on hot days the attic gets extremely warm and the house stays really cool during the day, so it's very pleasant to be in instead of outside. But by the time night rolls around the air in the attic starts to filter down and it gets HOT.

ANYWAY, Chris bought a thermometer so we can see the temp. inside and outside and we set it up the other day. This is the INSIDE temperature

51 degrees! I can see my breath! The house doesn't have a heating system (again, stupid previous owners) and space heaters are really unsafe, dangerous, and use A LOT of energy making a really high PG&E bill, so we'll have to deal with it for now. I know anyone reading this that lives in New England, Canada or Siberia is probably laughing, but hey, I'm born and bred in the central Bay Area I can't handle it above 80 or below 60. I know I know, SPOILED :)

Yesterday was a half day, and by half I don't mean half the time spent I mean half ass. Chris set up his tile saw he got and cleaned the garage. I finally finished refinishing the hutch (and all of our crap has returned to the top of it)

We cleaned up and organized the house a bit (especially the art room to get it ready for work today). I insulated the exposed corner of the art room with great stuff (one of my FAVORITE things, I LOVE great stuff) and regular fiberglass insulation

And a ring at the door at 10am brought Rafael back to the house to finish the stucco. It looks GREAT! He matched the texture extremely well and did a great job cleaning up. The back of the art room looks AMAZING now (if you live in the Bay Area and need stucco work, I would really recommend him, but you need someone who speaks Spanish because he speaks very little English)

It's hard to believe that only three weeks ago it looked like this