This weekend’s big excitement was that we replaced our main thermostat, the one in the original house. We have two thermostats, but the second one (in the family room addition) only turns on the second circulator and doesn’t have the ability to kick on the furnace. There were a variety of issues with the old thermostat, but they can be summed up as: it didn’t really work.

Our happiness with the new thermostat can be summed up as: it works! It’s really kind of odd and satisfying to have the house temperature be maintained at a specific temperature. No more are we freezing and having to turn up the heat to get the furnace to kick on, nor do we wake up in the middle of the night in a sauna because it finally got cold enough to get the thermostat to work…and heat has been blasting out for hours. We’re hoping this will do wonders for our natural gas bill, but it’s already helped us to feel much more normal.

The only down side was that the installation required us to scuff up our nicely (newly) painted (yellow) wall. The new round backplate doesn’t quite cover the old rectangular hole, and the scraping off of bits of wallpaper that were hidden behind the old thermostat caused some wear that is visible now. I’ll paint it, but at a later point we really should take it back off and spackle and sand behind it. That would be the point when we get to improving of parts of the house that are perfectly functional and not in plain view. You know: later.