Another Hiccup and Some Progress

I try to hold off on turning on the heat as long as possible, usually waiting until we wake up and it's in the  upper 50s in the house before giving in. But Ryan was working from home the other day and even I had to admit that I was cold. It's been cloudy and in the low 60s more frequently, so I think the house was sitting at about 63 (we usually keep it at 68 in the winter). So I gave in and we turned on the heat. We were confident it worked because the day after closing we were in the house and it seemed awfully warm and we realized the heat was on!

So we turn it on and hear it start up and wander around the house making sure all the vents are open. And then a few minutes later, after getting the house to all of 64, nothing. Ryan opens up the utility closet, the door for the furnace proceeds to fall onto him, and we take a look. Blinking light. We learned with our oil furnace that that wasn't a good thing. So I look at the furnace and decide to call the number on the sticker of what looks like the company that installed the thing. I later noticed a sticker on the door front from some company that supposedly serviced it just this past March. Yeah, not calling them when the thing is broken down 6 months later!

Although the whole furnace breaking down thing is a pain, at least we discovered it while the weather is still warm and not in the middle of winter. The company was able to get someone out to look at the furnace the next day. He informed me that the gas valve was bad. I went ahead and signed up for their service plan because who knows what else will go wrong with the furnace in the next couple years since the place has been empty for several years. Anyway, they would need to order the part and would send a technician out to fix it once it was in. That happened yesterday and that guy spent over two hours checking out the furnace and realized it needed a new capacitor as well. In the end the repair that he expected to take just an hour took the whole afternoon and I was a bit late to picking up Gareth. But we have a working furnace. Now to get the thermostat programmed correctly.

In good news, we finally got around to purchasing ourselves a new mattress. Since ours was 10 years old it was probably about time to do this anyway. Researching memory foam was proving difficult and overwhelming. It felt like there were too many potential points at which to mess up what we chose for our mattress (which firmness you want all the layers, are the expensive Tempur-pedic really worth it?, etc). We'd had a couple people recommend latex to us along with a specific store. So we headed over there this past weekend. Things seemed to jive with what we'd read, but we went ahead and left without purchasing, just to give ourselves a chance to think things over and read up a bit more. I went back today and made the purchase. The mattress will arrive next week. We went with a California King so that Ryan can finally have his feet on the bed. Once it's in we'll move into our room and move Ryan's drumset into the basement bedroom. Woohoo!