Happy Wife = Happy Life = ongoing projects

 Rome, the saying goes, was not built in a day.  

Home improvement will take longer than the rise and fall of Rome and despite recent emotional issues, simply can not wait.  Plans were put in place months ago, and for a variety of reasons, could not be completed until now.

 Our home was built by its original owner and although there is much to be celebrated about it; it was never really updated since its construction in the 1970’s.  We replaced the roof shortly after moving in as well as the outdated wood stove used to heat the home with a much more efficient wood pellet stove.

Fast forward a few years and now we are in the process of replacing the older windows and doors with new and more efficient ones, and the stress of having those replaced as well as work in our kitchen and bath going on at the same time has caused me...to become "unsettled."

I would never call myself a fastidious person, but I do have my schedule and my own ways of doing things.  I like things to be organized and mostly neat.  Yes, I know all this is needed and will increase our house's value while decreasing our electric and water use which is exactly the goal.  Still though, I don’t like having my life upended for days at a time.

The old windows will be saved and recycled into a greenhouse project that we have planned.  Glass block windows will be placed in the basement.

We also plan on taking advantage of the various tax breaks and rebates that higher efficiency products can offer.  Frankly I would have like an even efficient model of window, but you always have to balance costs in the equations.  

New flooring was placed in the kitchen and main bathroom resulted in us replacing the toilet with a low flow model.   

The original kitchen

In our kitchen we made a slight reconfiguration in the layout, removing the "island," of the kitchen which resulted in over 3 feet of additional counter space as well as additional cabinet space.  Another floor to ceiling cabinet may be added as well.  The old electric stove will be replaced by gas (more on that in a bit) and both the refrigerator and dishwasher will be replaced as well.

We are far from finished but this is the last major piece of work that will be one for a while. It is the stove that is causing me grief currently.

Susan, my lovely wife, is a trained chef.  She had to adapt to our home in Florida which had an electric stove.  Even when we updated the kitchen there, we stayed with an electric stove.  When we moved here, we had an electric stove.   So basically she has had an electric stove for roughly 20 years.  She wanted a gas stove.

A happy wife often means a happy life.

The only issue with this is that our house is not piped for gas.   We would have to buy a stove that could run on propane, which was difficult at all, and then look into installing a propane tank.

This is where the fun begins.  Nearly all the gas companies in the area would not fill anything smaller than a 420 pound gas cylinder.  This holds approximately 96 gallons of gas when full and is the tank generally used for water heaters and another appliance – like a stove.   Again, our home is almost exclusively electric and that is one of the reasons I bought a generator after moving in. Luckily I can run the generator off of propane as needed in addition to gasoline.

Most of the companies in the area either wanted us to buy a tank outright or lease one from them.  After looking around at the price and what our perceived needs would be, we decided to go with a 100 gallon tank.  This should hold roughly 25 gallons of propane. 

Sue and I are gambling a bit here.  There is only the two of us and we would only use the gas for cooking and based upon average use, the stove should use about 35 gallons of propane per year.  So we can expect to fill it up 2 to 3 times a year.  Or we may even buy a second cylinder and connect it in parallel.

The cost of propane has been falling in Pennsylvania but you cannot expect that to go on forever, but if we are buying it roughly every 5 to 6 months or so that should be easy to budget. 

The environmentalist in me is questioning if we should be doing a gas stove anyhow.  There are growing concerns about the environmental and health concerns of using gas stoves.  Another thing that I didn't take into consideration with gas is that once I fill the cylinder it has to be transported upright.  

Currently we do not have a vehicle that we can use for this purpose, but we do have friends and family that do.  I just don't want to make calling them a habit, and is another reason why buying a small pick up may be in our future.

Yes, the stereotype of pickup trucks in the country is real.  

This video pretty much mirrors the issues that we faced and our process with some minor differences.  

Photos of the new kitchen and propane set up will be available on our Facebook page once this project has been completed.  All the major work will be out of the way.  It's just going take a bit of time to get the tile and painting done and the appliances installed.

This photo shows not only the floor, but where the new cabinets and counter space will be.  The walls will be painted a pretty grey and new countertops are going in as well.  The stove is the old electric stove which we will be removing.