Standing at the Trailhead of Winter

The new furnace is in and so far so good. The only hiccup in the process was buying the wrong size plenum and having to buy the right size, which meant a delay of three days' work while waiting for the correct plenum to arrive.    This is the old furnace. I tried finding out what year this is from, but so far no luck. The closest I came was one that looked similar, and it was from the 1960s. When we took this apart, this was the inside:   This thing was so interesting. It was basically a drum where the air heated up then was sent through the ducts. At least that's how I understood it. The flame to heat this was huge, as was just the pilot.  Now I have this: Quite the difference in size, and no more power box with an old-school fuse running the fan. The electrical is up-to-date, and the old gas line is out, replaced by new gas-flex tubing. It is so quiet when the air conditioner comes on that I have to actually go to the vents to see if it's really on.  I didn't ...

At least for now. Who knows what will happen a month down the road given the increase of variant cases. I'm hoping for the best but am prepared to end up completely online again. As of now, I'll return to campus on Monday. And my big summer project is 99.99% done. All that's left is touching up spots here and there. I finished up the basement windows and downspouts today, along with doing what I could with the doors to the basement stairs. They're not exterior doors, and they're warping because they take a lot of the weather since they're west-facing, but I'm going to leave them until next summer. Then I'll replace them with proper exterior doors. The house last fall. The house newly painted this summer. While I'm excited to have finished painting the house, I now have another issue to address: the septic. I was touching up the attic window and heard a motor shut off. I thought it was my neighbor's air conditioner and didn't think too much ab...