Some New Buys

I, as always, have found some fun things at the thrift stores. Here they are!

amazing little brass and fake wood record stand. holds 150 records.

rooster planter, who needs to be actually planted, hangs out with Celetron in the kitchen

green pyrex mixing bowls that I use almost every day, and new pink pyrex dish with lid and tray!

little blue pyrex casserole dish in really great shape

Rance the partridge has glowing green alien eyes. spooky.

little bowl from an estate sale that will be a planter for either haworthia or orchids

In other news, we've started restoring my turquoise oven!!!!! How exciting! Greg is thinking he is going to rewire the whole thing (the cooktop, at least) and possibly replace the elements with new ones, but we'll have to see if that is possible. We're going to get the chrome ring around the cooktop and all the little element rings re-chromed, so it will be shiny as new. There was alot of old grease and also mouse poop inside:

at least it got used a lot. that is a sign of a good stovetop!

can you find the flintstone vitamin??

Speaking of old and gross, we had to replace our furnace. We had our annual maintenece done and the guys come up the stairs with a sheepish look on their face and the bad news is that there are cracks in my heat exchanger. AWESOME. I am SO SO glad I didn't call in the winter, like I was supposed to. Lucky for me it was nice and springy out last week so having no heat was no problem, my house never went under 17.5 degrees and was in fact 19 or 20 for most of the three days we were furnace free!

 

 

new furnace

old furnace

Our old furnace was 19, which is a good age but not end-of-life. It was 100K BTU's which is a lot for our little house. the new one is a 2 stage mid efficiency, which is all we need. I pretty much got the furnace from freecycling, but it is a long story to tell so we'll just go with, we got a furnace that was used for 5 months installed with some new ducts for $1300. Try and beat that, I dare you!
Anyways it is nice to have heat! We are removing our old air conditioner (which is probably as old as this house! no jokes!) and this is what we found when we removed the condenser:

See all that junk on the metal? That is nicotine. And tar. And all the good stuff that goes with smoking in a house for 50 years. It's really effing disgusting.

One last pic before I sign off! I just want to show you the Gerard Method of securing one's home from intruders:

You take some metal strips (and not even heavy metal, but aluminum) and screw them into the window sash. Problem solved! Thanks Gerard, we can sleep well at night now!