You Gotta Love It....

...or NOT! Living in New England during the Winter has it's challenges. Living in New England, in a 35 yr. old mobile home, has even more challenges! Just how much fun can two people have? Well, let me tell you.

Here's the scenario for you: Tim gets up and goes to the kitchen for coffee at 6:30am. Checking the outdoor thermometer, he sees it reads 0 (yes, that's zero) degrees. Then, turning on the hot water to heat up his coffee mug,...nothing happened! And in New England, in January, that only means one thing ~ frozen pipes! So begins the standard drill: turn on all faucets to drip, toss in a load of laundry (warm/warm cycle), and get out space heaters. We narrowed down the frozen section to be someplace between the washer and the kitchen. The bathroom seems fine, which is good because that's what froze up last Winter. Tim cleared out under the sink, and put our smallest space heater under there. We had never noticed that there's quite a hole in the floor under there around where the pipes go under the house. There had been stuff stored under there and had covered it up. Well, Tim got under the cabinet (no small feat!)and found that there's no insulation around the pipes under the floor. Wonderful- it's just the way of things with this trailer. Anyway, once the dryer got turned on, the pipe finally unfroze and we have hot water in the kitchen. In the winter, we vent the dryer under the trailer to help with heating.

As I write this, Tim is under the trailer trying to get to the kitchen pipes to see how much pipe insulation to buy. There have been additions built on over the years that are making it very difficult.

We bought this place in Aug.'05. We bought it for the view of the lake. We have a dock and a backyard fire pit, and we love it here. It was also the cheapest house in Franklin county at the time. There were some very good reasons for that. Someday, we will build a nice house here. However, in the last year and a half, we have spent allot of time and money insulating everything. You would think that after 30+ years, the previous owners would have gotten that done, but Nooooooo... We thought that we had insulated all the pipes, but apparently we missed one. So, live and learn!

In the grand scheme of things, I know that Tim and I are very lucky. We have a safe, warm, place to live. It just happens to be a run-down trailer right now, complete with single-pane crank out windows, and there's not a lot on it that wasn't trashed when we bought it. The additions that were done of a living room make it livable, in terms of having enough space. Although, when they built it, they never installed any heating system in it. Go figure? Fortunately, there's only the two of us. There's also a lot more living space since I moved my herbal workshop to another place. We have reclaimed the office/hallway area for our own.

Well, I need to go make more coffee. Tim is still working under the trailer. It's warmed up to a balmy 2 degrees out there! I also need to do another load of laundry to keep the dryer going, so that we continue to have running water.

I love New England! What are some of the challenges where you live?