Spring Break at 83 Durant (woo hoo!)

We started Spring Break off right on Friday by going to the RESTORE in Springfield. It is our new favorite place. You can check out details at their site, but basically, they carefully deconstruct houses or rooms that are about to be demolished, and save anything that's worth saving. Radiators, bathtubs, cabinets, woodfloors, moulding, everything and anything you can imagine. They also take donations from contractors, or anyone, and sometimes it's even new stuff. For instance, if someone purchased five times the insulation they needed to complete a job, they could donate some to the ReStore. There was a ton of tile and lighting fixtures, and a crazy number of doors and windows of various shapes and sizes. It's an amazing place. They they sell everything for A LOT less than you could find it anywhere else. It's basically a home-repair thrift store.

We got a new utility sink for $20; it will replace the busted utility sink currently in our basement. We also got a lot of exciting ideas for future projects, so we'll be going back again once we have some plans, measurements, and time. It's a great place.

In the upcoming week, we're hoping to take care of a few things:

--Storm door for pink room door
--Studor vent in the attic
--cork floor hole in bathroom
--further insulate/weatherstrip attic hatch
--close flue hole in basement chimney
--work on leaky basement window

MAYBE we will take on some other things (depending on time)
--insulation in empty bays in basement

Today we also received the results of our thermal imaging of the house, which we had done on Monday. We found out a lot about the insulation in the house, and most of it was good news. Someone did insulate most of the walls (probably with blown-in cellulose). There are spots that were missed, and some spots where things have settled, but mostly, we're in pretty good shape. Here's a page from the report. the top part shows the door to the outside from the pink room; the bottom one shows the door to the outside from the kitchen. It's clear that we need some storm doors!



I'll add some more details and images later. We're thrilled with the very informative report, provided by Proscan Infrared Thermography.