After about three months of service calls on our furnace, we think it’s finally fixed!!! The service tech started by replacing the motor that failed a couple of weeks ago, but that made no difference. We were able to run the furnace again, but after about 40 minutes, the furnace shut off, flashing the pressure switch error code again.

A couple of visits later, he asked us to run the furnace for a few days with the front cover off of the unit. Since it’s sealed combustion, he said it wouldn’t cause any problems and it would allow the unit to vent better. Without the front cover, we couldn’t get the furnace to duplicate the problem.

Once we figured that out, the service tech came back to look at a few more things. He wound up calling Trane technical support and running a bunch of diagnostics on the furnace. They couldn’t find anything wrong with it except that the gas pressure was a little high. He lowered it so the furnace wouldn’t burn so hot and then he increased the fan speed to move more air thru the unit. The combined effect is that there isn’t as great of a heat build up inside the unit. After making these adjustments, we’ve been able to run the furnace with the cover on for several days without having any pressure switch errors!

The only downside is that the furnace seems to be running a lot more. We aren’t sure how much of it is because of the recent cold snap and how much is caused by the lowered gas pressure. Hopefully we’ll find that the furnace runs much less next week when the weather warms up a bit.

We finally figured out how to get rid of the lingering smell of our new stove! After two excruciatingly smelly hours of running the self-clean cycle, the oven no longer reeks while baking!

The owner’s manual recommends making sure the room is well ventilated during the first cycle and warns that the odor may be harmful to birds, so I’m guessing that means the smell is fairly common among new stoves. I’m just glad it appears to have fixed it!

We just placed the order with the furniture store for our family room furniture! I’m so excited to see what it’s going to look like in our sun room, but they said to expect that it will take 6 to 8 weeks before it’ll be delivered. It sounds like pieces will be trickling in as they arrive during that time, so we’re hoping we’ll get to see some of it in our room sooner …

Here’s a floor plan for the room that was put together by the store’s design service. It basically matches the plan we had made ourselves earlier.

With much help from our very patient designer, we finally settled on purchasing most of the items in the floor plan. Here are pictures of some of the things we picked out:

The recliner will be covered in the same color leather as in the picture. We’re really excited about it since it’s so incredibly comfortable. The couch and matching chair (minus the ottoman shown in the photo) will be covered in a tan microfiber fabric. Instead of a coffee table, we decided to go with a large storage ottoman (so we won’t feel so bad about it when we put our feet on our new furniture). It’ll be covered in a textured, off-white microfiber fabric and won’t have the skirt that’s shown in the photo. The rest of the tables, lamps, and artwork will be pretty much exactly like they are in the picture. There’s also a variegated, plush brown area rug that will cover a good portion of the floor and a couple of patterned accent pillows to pull it all together. For a paint color, we’re debating between the 2nd and 3rd darkest shades on the paint chip (the other, lighter colors are the palette for the rest of the house).

I’m just so horrible at visualizing what the room will look like with everything in it and I really can’t wait for all of the furniture to arrive so we can see it all together and covered in the right fabrics. Hopefully the next couple of months will go quickly!

When we bought our new lawn tractor last October, we seriously debated waiting until this spring to make the purchase. We thought there was probably a good chance we could make it through the fall and winter without a real need to mow or plow snow. Today, however, was another of those times when we were glad that we decided to make the purchase 6 months early. With a large amount of snowfall so far this year in comparison to previous years, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to make use of our new lawn tractor and blade and it’s turned out to make our snow removal job much easier.

A couple of things we’ve learned in our snow plowing adventures over the last month or so:

1) Tire chains and weights are important. Our yard slopes away on either side of our driveway and more than once we’ve found ourselves digging the tractor out after it’s slid off the driveway and into the yard. Without the weights and chains, it’s awfully easy to lose traction and start sliding around.

2) Hydraulic angling of the blade is worth the extra money. We were debating between the John Deere X540 and X720 models of lawn tractors when we made our purchase last fall. The key distinction between the two for us was the hydraulics on the X720 and it turns out that this makes a huge difference in how easy or difficult it is to plow. Definitely worth the premium in our minds.

We had another visit by the service technician today to try to diagnose the cause of the pressure switch errors on our furnace. The problem had been getting steadily worse over the weekend, with the below-zero temperatures forcing it to run for longer and more frequent cycles. We had problems several times where we were unable to get it to turn on at all … something slightly different from our previous experiences of being able to reset the unit at the thermostat to get it going again.

Today, the furnace was actually having the problem when the service tech came and he was able to quickly diagnose the cause of our frustrations as being the motor that drives the fan responsible for pushing the exhaust out of the system. He said it was hot to the touch and not working properly when he tested it with a volt meter. His thought was that the furnace has probably been experiencing the same problem with the motor overheating and shutting off, setting the pressure switch error code, since the start of the season, but with the extremely cold temperatures over the last few days (and with us attempting to reset it to get it going again), the motor had finally burnt out completely.

The part we’ll need is going to run about $330, but should be covered under the furnace’s warranty since it’s only about 3 years old. The labor to install it (he’s estimating around 2 hours) will be billed to our home warranty. Bad news is that the part is special order and won’t be here for a couple of days. With the furnace completely out-of-commission now, it’ll be a cold couple of nights on the second floor. Guess we should just be grateful it’s not the only one in the house or the situation could be much worse!

This afternoon, we started on what we were sure was going to be a multiple day effort to remove the green, floral wallpaper from our sun room walls. Given our previous experiences with removing wallpaper, we were crossing our fingers, hoping that the paper would at least be strippable and the walls properly prepped. Surprisingly, though, it turned out to be even easier than we had hoped! Though the wallpaper looked very well adhered to the walls and the edges weren’t curling even a little when we started, it peeled right off, leaving absolutely no damage to the underlying walls.

One thing we were a little surprised by was the fact that the walls were painted the same green color as the wallpaper underneath. We were expecting them to be white or at least something different than the green (and we were really hoping to not find any other layers of wallpaper underneath), but then we remembered a comment the previous owner had made about making sure to paint under all of the wallpaper in the same color as the background so that it would blend if the paper happened to shrink, showing the wall color at the seams. I’m not sure what, if anything, they did to prep the walls besides just painting them green, but whatever steps they took turned this into the miracle wallpaper that’s well-adhered to the wall when you like it and comes down super easily when you change your mind. If only all wallpaper was like this!

Here’s a photo of the room minus the wallpaper. We think all of the white marks on the green paint are the result of patching and sanding that took place before the wallpaper was hung since none of that paint came off on the back of the wallpaper we just took down.

Now the room feels something like a mix between a dorm room and a golf pro shop with the solid green, somewhat marred up walls and all of our miss-matched left over furniture that doesn’t really fit anywhere in the new home. I just can’t wait to see what it’s going to look like with a new, more earthy paint color and real furniture!

Shortly after we moved into our house last fall, we started the process of removing wallpaper in our new home. We started with the floral border in our bedroom, but never made it any further before the holiday season. Now, we’re starting a project to remove wallpaper, paint, and decorate our sun room. The plan is to strip the wallpaper in that room and then have someone come in to paint both the sun room and our bedroom at the same time.

Our plan is to use the sun room as a family room since we don’t have another space for that on the main floor. Since it’s accessed from the formal living room and can be seen through the french doors, we want to make sure that whatever we do will coordinate with the living room. We’ve spent the last couple of weeks walking through furniture stores, trying to decide on a floor plan, and thinking about paint color selections.

Here are a couple of “before” pictures of our sun room as it is today:

And here’s the rendering of the room with the furniture layout and colors we’ve been thinking about:

We think we like the general flow of the room since all four of the doorways are fully accessible (something that’s more difficult than it sounds with so many doorways in such a long and narrow room). We also like that the TV can’t be seen from the more formal living room. One thing we weren’t sure about is blocking the windows with the couch and tables, but the more we’ve thought about it, we think we’ve actually got a better view out of the doors on either end of the room with the couch against the window wall … and it seems to be the only way to get the flow of the room to really work.

The software I used to do the rendering (Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer) is great for figuring out size-wise what will fit, but I haven’t figured out how to pick custom colors and textures for the furniture, so visualizing colors and fabrics is still a challenge. I think it’s still definitely worth the time to do the model, though, because it turns out that the layout we thought we’d like just wouldn’t work at all!

Last Thursday, we had the 4th service call on our furnace since last October in an attempt to fix the problem that’s causing it to flash the pressure switch error code. This time, we had a different technician come to look at it and he had some new ideas on what could be causing the problem.

He started by cleaning out the trap in the drain. Since this had already been done on the first service call last fall, only a small amount of nasty-looking gunk came out of it and it wasn’t as blocked as he’d expected, so this was likely not the cause of our problems. He then tested the drain itself by pouring a pitcher of water down it to make sure there were no backups. Since the drain accepted the entire pitcher with no problems and that’s more than the furnace would ever drain, he ruled that out as well.

According to this technician, a pressure switch error could be caused by a blockage in the intake, exhaust or drain. Since he thought he’d heard water backing up in the furnace when he first turned it on (something that’s not supposed to happen) and the drain appeared to not be the problem, he proceeded to investigate the intake and exhaust to see if there was a problem there.

Next, he looked at all of the PVC piping for the intake and exhaust to make sure that everything was sloped downhill so there would be no place for water to gather and pool. Finding nothing that looked suspect there, he then took a sawzall to the exhaust pipe, cutting it in half so he could look up and down it with a flashlight to see if there were any obstructions. Had a bird built a nest in the exhaust pipe, it could be blocking just enough air flow to cause the pressure switch to flip. Unfortunately, though, there were no obstructions in that pipe, so it seemed to not be a problem.

Since the tech wasn’t able to duplicate the problem and the sound of water backing up in the furnace didn’t appear to be happening any more, he was having some trouble pin-pointing the cause and left our house on Thursday with the intake unhooked from the furnace so that it would draw air from the room rather than outside. The idea was that, if the furnace didn’t have the problem while the intake was unhooked, we would wait several days, reattach it, and if the problem returned, we’d know the blockage was in the intake. If the problem occurred even when the intake pipe was detached, then we’d know we could rule that out as the cause.

Less than a half hour after the technician left our house, the furnace shut off again, with the light blinking 3 times, indicating a pressure switch error. Since then, we’ve had the problem numerous times. Last night and again this afternoon, it’s been so bad that we haven’t been able to get the furnace to come on at all.

According to the technician, the next steps will be to replace the pressure switch itself and then get Trane technical support on the phone to walk him through some diagnostics on the furnace to see if they can determine the problem. At least there’s a plan going forward … I just wish it were a more obvious problem!

An interesting side note: the technician commented on the number of registers we had closed in the attic and said the recommendation is that no more than 15% of the registers be closed at any time. Closing more could result in the heat exchanger cracking, which wouldn’t be covered under warranty.

Back in November, we started having problems with the furnace in our attic. We’d wake up in the morning or come home from work and notice that the thermostat showed a temperature several degrees lower than what it was set at, but the furnace wouldn’t be running. We’d go upstairs to find a red light on the furnace blinking 3 times, indicating a pressure switch error. The furnace is relatively new – it’s a Trane XR90 model that the previous owner said they installed only about 3 years ago.

At the time, we put in a service request with our home warranty and they sent a local repair company out to take a look at it. He cleaned the intake and the problem seemed to go away for a while, but no more than a couple of weeks later, we had the same issue again. We had the home warranty company send a recall to the repair place and the same guy came out to take a look at it. Since the problem is so intermittent, though (the furnace resets itself after a set time and will then run again for a while before having the issue again), he was unable to determine anything. He told us when he left that he didn’t see anything wrong with it, but that we should call him back if we continued to have the same problem with it and he would “start replacing stuff”.

It wasn’t even 24 hours after he left that the problem happened again (off hours, of course). I should have called them back then, but we got wrapped up in other things and, long story short, we’ve been living with the problem for the last couple of months.

Last week, we were watching television upstairs one night when the problem was particularly bad. Normally, when we notice the furnace has shut off because of the pressure switch problem, we can reset it (either at the thermostat or by flipping the power switch in the utility closet) and that’ll cause it to clear the error code and start up again. Last week, though, we tried that multiple times and it would almost immediately shut off again with the same error code flashing.

So, I put in a call to the home warranty again, and they sent the same heating company out to look at it again. This time the guy brought reinforcements, but they were still unable to duplicate the problem. They wound up replacing the main circuit board (because he thought he heard it making a weird buzzing noise – technical, huh?) and, up until today, we thought that had fixed the problem. Tonight, when we got home from work, though, the furnace was shut off again, with the pressure switch error code flashing. We were able to reset it and it’s ran fine for the rest of the evening.

I put in another call to have someone come take a look at it, but I have very little faith that they’ll actually be able to figure out what’s wrong with it. The only thing we’ve noticed is that it seems to happen more frequently when it’s windy outside. Seems strange (and the furnace guy assures us that can’t possibly be the cause), but it is an interesting coincidence …

Back in October, when we purchased a new stove and microwave-hood combination for our kitchen, their installation created a couple of follow-up projects. The first was to install a new outlet in the cabinet above the microwave hood and the second was to install the portion of the tile back splash behind the stove that we discovered was missing when we removed the old stove from the kitchen.

Our intentions were really great – we planned to do both of these projects shortly after the installation was complete. But, now it’s 3 months later, the tile still isn’t on the wall, and just last week, it dawned on me exactly how long we’d been running the microwave off of an extension cord, which just can’t be a good combination. So, we put in a call to the electrician and the new outlet was finally installed last Wednesday. The cabinets look so much nicer without the white extension cord wrapped around the top and down the side to the outlet over the counter. Almost as good as having the microwave plugged in to a normal outlet is the fact that we will now have a place to plug in the Christmas lights I’m so looking forward to putting on top of the cabinets next year!

Now, we just need to decide what to do with the back splash. The previous owners left us enough of the tile that we could piece together the section that’s missing … or we could just replace the back splash with something else altogether since we aren’t really in love with what’s there. But then that opens a whole other can of worms – should we keep the counter tops if we’re going through the work to replace the back splash? And then the project just grows from there. Needless to say, I think the back splash project is still a ways off …