Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day, friends! Wishing you a very lovely day and weekend ahead.

We have heat!!! The new furnace is in, and it already feels like it heats the house faster than our old one. Last night was a cold one. 

The living room got down to 57 degrees F overnight and the bedrooms hovered around 50 degrees F. At 5 AM the air felt so cold around my head that I just got up and turned the fireplace and space heaters back on. We didn't want to leave them running unattended overnight, so I turned them off when I went to bed on Thursday.

The four of us had a delicious Valentine's brunch in front of the fireplace. We listened to music on spotify and enjoyed a few minutes together. One daughter had to rush off to her job for the weekend and the other needed to work on her latest commissions. My husband took today as a work from home day to be here for the furnace installation and the brunch. After brunch he got right back to the computer.

I baked the pie for dinner early this morning, keeping the oven going to add heat to the kitchen. Any heat we could get was helpful. Have you ever been so cold that your body seemed to have a memory of being cold even after the temperatures had warmed up? That's how I feel right now, an hour after the new furnace has been working. I'll keep myself moving and will feel warmed up in no time.

The saga of the failing furnace has now come to an end, thankfully. I'm grateful to live in a time when the homemaker doesn't normally need to spend so much time thinking about increasing the heat in the house. We just push a button and forget about it.

Anyway, have a wonderful day and weekend!

Well the temporary ability of the furnace failed overnight,

and our new install isn't until tomorrow. Today's high was 39 degrees F and low about 26 degrees F. That's the bad news. There is good news.

We kept the living room and entry hall at 64 degrees F until noon and 66 degrees in the afternoon, using a space heater and the electric fireplace (with heat output). That's really good. The fireplace and space heaters were turned on at 3 AM. It was 27 degrees F when I got up this morning and the temp in the living room hadn't changed for the worse. I'm keeping the kitchen warm enough with the large cast iron griddle across 2 gas burners on low (with a pot of hot cereal keeping warm on the griddle) plus 1 burner with the tea kettle on low. It doesn't take much to keep the kitchen warm-enough. The bedrooms are chilly, but we're doing okay. The other good news is the furnace lasted through the coldest of this cold snap, and the temps will only rise incrementally from here. The other good news is we absolutely know that we eked every last bit out of our furnace. I'd say we got "good value" out of that furnace, purchased 29 years ago.

We also have a couple of microwaveable heat pads for personal heating and for heating beds at bedtime. We only have to get through one last day and night before our new furnace will be installed. That's all good news.

The other positive to today is I cooked a hot lunch for all of us and we enjoyed not only a hot meal, but eating together. And I was motivated to begin cooking for tomorrow, as being in a warm kitchen cooking is better than any colder place today.

I'm choosing to look for the good news in all of this. Soon, this period will be behind us, and we'll have reliable heat once again.

I hope your week is going well.