Home Improvement

The sky feels like snow but we're not really supposed to get much. All week it's been rain and the valley is full of tourists trying to ski. It's funny living in a resort area, on bad weather days you can hear the traffic humming on the highway across the river and it sounds like a hive of angry bees. No cross country skiing, or rather, just not great skiing, nothing else to do but shop and eat and spend money. Especially when it's pouring rain.The mountains call it "frozen granular" the locals know it means crushed ice. Or what we call New England Hardpack.
So no skiing for us this lovely week before everyone decides to start on the video or web projects that we could have finished up nicely in November or December. There's something about the New Year, everyone hits the deck running as we say. We already had the first call for a project I thought was dead. There's about a dozen more lined up. Sigh. It's great to have work but boy, downtime is nice for learning new software and writing and we had time for the project pictured above. Or rather we had time to do it well.
Because the furnace decided to quit just before Christmas we went ahead with our plans to take down the old furnace room and move the location for the new one, which is smaller and more efficient. I didn't take a before picture but just as well. Friends know what it looked like, since it's the first thing you see coming into the house. It was what you could call the elephant in the room. And when it went on it sounded like a jet engine.
We were amazed at how big the room was with the furnace room gone. It's a nice, airy space with the high ceiling. My art room is off to the side (currently a mess with everything piled up because of the construction). Olof does his ski tuning here and he has his easel and there is a light table for looking at slides. We're going to move the washer drier down here too, we'll finally have a closet for towels in the bathroom. It will become the room for doing stuff in.
I've done so much home improvement over the last thirty years I don't know if I'd make it through building another house. We're finally getting to the point where this one will be finished off. Amazing.