New Furnace Time! Part I

I need to have a blogging marathon and since I am holed up in my room due to chilliness and contractors wandering around downstairs, today might be the day! (pending baby nap time) I think I will have to go backwards on my time line though because I didn't even post my b-day giftings or my last garage sale weekend find. Gesh! Is there a "most disorganized blogger" award out there? I think I would win it.

Back to why I am hanging out in the bedroom today. Last week the pilot light went out in the furnace. I grew up with a father who was (is) an electrical engineer and decided electric was the way to go so he installed electric everything and even had the gas lines removed. This idea of a pilot light freaks me out, Mark is also a weanie when it comes to this so I had my brother check it out. We opened the furnace up to discover gas was still spewing out which is supposed to stop when the pilot goes out, isn't it?? We turned off the gas to the furnace, examined it further to find one of the little safety buttons was not popping closed. I called the heating place to see if it was worth fixing. The guy came over to check out the problem along with a general check over and found the heat exchange (er, something like that) was cracked. Whew, not that I wanted to put money into a new furnace BUT we did buy the house knowing this day would come so I was kind of scared the repair would be only moderately expensive and I really didn't want to put money into the old furnace.

The huge old furnace. I'm just glad the original asbestos octopus was long gone.

Adding on the central AC in 1981 involved sticking a bunch of random wires all over the outside of the furnace.

 

Here is the above mentioned central air from 1981. It was still plugging along last summer but we decided we may as well get it replaced too since at 31 years of age, with little to no maintenance from the previous owner, it has to be on its last legs.

 

I thought they had all of the furnace out when I shot this but I saw them loading another big chunk onto the truck later. It seriously looked like a rusty plane part fell out of the sky and landed in our yard.

 

I snuck downstairs during their lunch break hoping to find a huge empty spot to photograph though I was also pleased to see they had already set up the new furnace!

 

So far so good. Hopefully everything will be 100% set up tomorrow with everyone gone because I get so antsy when strange people are wandering around my house. Not that I like to walk around naked or anything (especially with no heat) but I just feel awkward and uncomfortable!