Well, I’m tap dancing now. I’d like to show you some action shots of my homebrew insulation blaster, but I can’t get a quorum. It only takes two to do the insulation tango, but we need a band, too, or in this case, a third person to hold the camera. The spare heir is taking midterms and the heir is out doing adult-ish things and can’t come over. But you fine folks deserve some sort of renovation debacle to look at. I guess I’ll need a totally new project to get you scratching your collective heads and wondering why we bought this hovel in the first place. Lord knows I’ve worn a rut in mine scratching and wondering.

Speaking of ruts, how about the dining room? It’s a more recent vintage of renovation project. I think I still have a splinter and a bruise or two left over from it, so it’s got to be from this year, at least. We didn’t plan on doing much how-to pontificating about it on the intertunnel, so the pictures are a little spotty, but they’ll have to do.

Say, what did it look like when we moved in? Here you go:

Whoa. We didn’t even own the place in this picture. My wife and the real estate agent are wandering aimlessly in the living room, while I take a picture of the dining room. This is the end stage of the real estate process where the agent is staying fourteen arms-length away from me at all times. She’d tried to perform her real estate fandango on us several times, waving her arms and extolling the virtues of licks of paint and ceiling fans, while intoning, sotto voce, that there was a polymath handyman interested in this house, too, just like the last house she showed us, and the house before that, so we’d better jump on it right away. I said, “Great, what’s his phone number, I’d like to hire him,” and that shut her piehole right quick. Her bandaged finger wobbled back to the real estate candle a few more times, but after a while she’d just let me look around in peace.

There’s lots to love in the last picture, besides my wife. Someone wanted something heavy and oily from the basement, and dragged it all the way through the house, leaving a minor trench in the birch strip flooring. I’m sure the apparatus was worth ten cents, and they wrecked 300,000 pennies-worth of flooring to get it, but then again, they got the thing out, whatever it was, and they’re not dumb enough to buy this place (again), so the gouge in the floor is filed under: Accounts Payable – Never.

Turn to the left and look through the milky sunshine at an abandoned greenhouse in the neighbor’s yard. It was a ruin left from a florist who had decamped long ago. The glass was mostly gone, and in the summer whatever plants that could take the temps around here had naturalized and blended in with the local stuff. Very picturesque.

That baseboard heater was also a ruin. Like all the other heating stuff in the house, it was left with water in it, which froze, and burst the pipes. It would all have to go.

Turning to the right, you can see the entry to the master bedroom. If you have keen eyesight, you can spot shingles on the far wall in there. The two largest walls in there were shingled. I have some theories about what prompted the former denizens to do such things, and they involve Timothy Leary and Johnny Walker in equal measure.

Hey look, there’s a thermostat on the wall. You know what that means. Right! Absolutely nothing. We didn’t get a thermostat that does things when you operate it for another ten years. I left it there anyway, to mock my dreams of heat, and because it covered a hole, which is not nothing in my world.

Here’s the ceiling. Those are cardboard tiles. I measured the distance from the floor to this ceiling, and then compared it to the living room ceiling, which was the original plaster. It was several inches lower, so I knew the ghosts of ceilings past was still living above it.

You might have noticed this in the floor earlier. It’s a very heavy cast iron grate. The old oil-fired boiler was located underneath this spot in the basement. Most people assume that grates like these are to let heated air pass upwards through a house. Most people are mistaken. It’s nearly impossible to get any substantial amount of heat to go through a vent like this. Heat rises, it’s true, but it’s like a heavy woman trying on jeans. It fights to continue its convection loops, and doesn’t like to be forced into small spaces. That’s why there’s a big fan on a furnace. To force the issue.

That’s a cold air return. If a furnace makes hot air, and pushes it around, it needs a way to gather the same amount of air back to heat it again. Otherwise, it’s like trying to blow up a balloom that won’t expand (your house). It draws air back to itself, reheats it, and sends it back in a continuous loop.

But this house had a oil boiler. That’s a closed system, and air is heated by passing over pipes and fins in the baseboard units. What’s the return air for, you might ask? Well, the boiler is (was, it was toast) burning a mixture of oil and ambient air, and then sending the smoky remains up the chimney. The air has to come from somewhere, and if you suck it all out of the basement, the only way for the basement to get more is to pull it in from outside, where it was currently just above zero when these pictures were taken, if I remember correctly. That’s because it wasn’t winter yet, when it really gets cold.

I’ll leave it to you whether it was smarter to pull heated air out of the dining room to burn in the boiler than getting it from the basement. I imagine that the previous owners didn’t think about it very much, and simply cut a huge hole in the floor because the boiler downstairs felt hot, and maybe the heat from it would go up through the grate, and ended up colder than before for their troubles. Me, I’ve got other plans for that baby.

[To be continued. To support Sippican Cottage, feel free to leave a comment, tell a friend about us, buy a book if you already haven’t, or hit the Donate button. And thanks!]