Visit #2 (25Dec05-6Jan06)

We arrived on Christmas day and it was C-O-L-D! The house was 3C inside. We had no experience lighting a fioul heater, so a neighbor came to give us help. Sleeping on the air mattress on the cold living room floor was very unpleasant; in spite of sub-zero sleeping bags and blankets, heat was being sucked out of us. Kaye finally remembered packing a Mylar blanket so we put that on the mattress. A bit crinkly, but it saved the night. The house remained cold for a long time, since it took us several days to get the hang of using the heater.

The next morning, we unloaded a vanful of furniture that we'd bought from a departing Compuware colleague. Besides a washing machine, we got a queen-sized bed, dresser, bookcases, and some small cabinets. We set the bed up in the small bedroom off the mezzanine. Heat rising, it was quite a bit warmer than the ground floor.

When we came to the area earlier in the year, thinking we'd be able to buy the house in March, we stayed at a B&B in a nearby town. The B&B owners were an English/Austrian couple. We knew they were retiring and that he was quite handy, so we dropped in on them, hoping he might be interested in a bit of work on our house. No, he was quite happily retired, thank you, but he referred us to his friends Mike, a plumber-electrician, and Sally, who agreed to take us on.

Two nights before we left, Ed was installing a new toilet seat in the WC (replacing the old very bright red one) and broke the toilet -- luckily on the clean water side -- Mike's first job.

The first work they will do is to merge the WC into the bathroom, closing the door to the living room and creating an arched opening into the bathroom. They'll also arrange to get the shutters painted.