The silence is deafening

I finally got off my butt and had our furnace serviced for the upcoming (OK - we live in Ontario - we've been using the furnace for a couple of months) winter. Isn't today the first day of winter? Anyway, the furnace is 23 years old and for the last couple of years, the service technicians have been strongly suggesting that we replace the furnace. Not ready to jump into things, we kept putting it off. I had visions of HUGE expenses and wasn't prepared to cough up a lot of money.

The furnace

Besides getting a wee lecture on keeping the filters clean, everything was fine. We have a maintenance plan and the service guy was out the door in quick order. But NOT before I agreed to have a salesperson come visit the next day which was yesterday. Like the service tech the day before, the salesperson arrived an hour EARLY.

After walking through the information, I decided that it was definitely worth our while to get a new furnace and A/C (although we don't use it - but for resale at some point down the road) and it was only going to cost and extra $100 (more or less per month). That's not bad and way better than I envisioned. In total, that appointment lasted a couple of hours and we got the pre-inspection done, the parts are ordered and the install date is set for Christmas Eve. Yipppeeeee!!!!

I did note during the day that I was cold. Colder than usual, but it was a sunny day and the furnace doesn't kick in a lot when the sun shines. However, by bedtime, I thought I better have a look at the thermostat to see if they had changed the temperature when the inspection guys were messing around with stuff.

Oh boy - big trouble. The thermostat is DEAD. I've searched the sides for an On/off switch and I don't see anything. It's quite loose on the wall where it wasn't before and I bet with all the inspecting, they've loosened or disconnected something. Guess what that means - we have NO FURNACE.

The thermostat is dead

So at 10 PM last night, I was on the phone trying to book a service call. The dispatcher came back with an appointment on Sunday. WAIT A MINUTE - it's winter and you want me to live without a furnace for two entire days?  I think not! I did manage to get a service call for tonight at 7 PM. It's amazing how NOISY the HVAC system in the house. It's so quiet with no fan blowing. Let's hope that the guy is one hour early like the previous two appointments!

In the meantime, I guess I'll be resorting to an extra sweater. Thankfully, the weather is going above zero today with sunshine so that'll make the house warm. The pilot light in our gas fireplace is out and I'm terribly afraid of anything gas. So when the guys come tonight, I'm going to get them to relight the pilot light!

Here's the deal - if you've been hesitating to get a new furnace, I'd go for it! Yes - it's extra money each month, but hopefully, the new system will be way more efficient. I mean - the current system is 23 years old. There's bound to be new. It means a whole lot of changes in the furnace area - new ductwork, new venting, new, new, new. It appears (and we know this as the gospel truth) that when a builder builds a home, they put crap in and don't care about most things. There are a lot of things wrong with the way our furnace was installed. We're lucky that we got 23 years out of it!

As a result of all that, I lost several hours that I was going to work on my UFOs, but it's all going to be worth it in the end. If we survive today! Way back when I lived in Quebec, my furnace died on me. Not a fun day. I had just had my wisdom teeth taken out and when my friend dropped me off at my house, I was flying higher than a kite. The house was frigid - it was January in Quebec. And to top it off? The dog had destroyed a couple of pillows so there was pillow fluff all over the house!! Now how can you ever forget a day like that? Fortunately, my friend stayed and cleaned up the pillow mess, called the furnace repair people and put me to bed! Oh, what fun!

I've been busy at the long arm for the last couple of days as well and happy to report that all the customer quilts for the year are quilted! I still have to sew on a binding later today.

Customer quilt - DONE

Customer quilt - DONE

And here's the third one.

Custome quilt - DONE

Things were going so merrily along with that third quilt - I should be done by dinner. BUT when I advanced the quilt to do the third row, I almost had a heart attack. What the heck???? This is what I saw. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Eyelash stitching on the back

This is not good and it was for half of the row. That is a good thing as you'll see. I looked at the first part of the row. Hmm - no eyelash, but not good stitching. That was for about 3/8 of a row. The first 1/8 was fine.

Better but not good enough

I finished the quilt. Then without removing it from the long arm, I unrolled it and got out a chair and the seam ripping tools and I ripped and I ripped and I ripped. It took as long to get rid of that perfectly stitched 1/8 as it did to get rid of the bad stitching. I wasn't sure how close I could get the quilting matched up - well - I could get it perfect, but I thought it would be better to rip out the entire row. It took FOREVER!!!

Ripping and ripping

I've no idea why that happened. Unless it was at at a bobbin change and the bobbin wasn't inserted properly. You can believe that I watched that quilt like a hawk to see if it happened again. It did not.

Once the row was ripped out, I rolled the quilt back up. You see, little tiny registration marks are added as each row is quilted. That made it pretty simple to get that row back in place.

Thre's a tiny blue dot as a registration mark

And now the quilt is lined back up after I adjusted the computer to match the row on the quilt although all rows were the same - I restitched the second row.

The second row is ready to restitch

The stitching should look like this. AHA - you can't see the stitching and that's what I was aiming for.

Really good stitching

That put me back a lot and I was so focused on the audiobook and the ripping, that I didn't notice the temperature in the house had dropped until late! Oh yes - yesterday was a comedy of errors all around. I did go for a walk, but I was almost afraid to go out in case something happened. By all standards, it was a boring walk and I was just fine with that.


I did get some sewing done for me  - not a lot, but I did get some. I managed to get the sleeve made for the plastic bottom in that Weekender bag that Shelly finished off for me.

The sleeve for the plastic bag bottom

And it's inserted into the bag. Done!

The bottom is in the bag

On that note, I'm out of here! I did accomplish a fair bit of paperwork yesterday. I see there's more to do today - yippee!!! And then I have another quilt to tackle this afternoon. Oh - there's loads to say about the quilt (don't worry - it doesn't belong to any customer). You'll get the whole scoop tomorrow - should I survive the deep freeze which is our house! Hmm - this would be the perfect day to box up the junk in the office. I need to keep moving in order to stay warm. Let's see what happens.

Have a super day!!!!

Ciao!!