I refer to our two hundred year old home as a white elephant. I am in the greenhouse business and my husband is a rabid gardener, so the grounds are planted with rare trees and flower gardens and go on for acres. Over the years we have added a large gazebo and a spring fed pond. yadayadayada. Only a person who knows old homes first hand, and has the time or money to hire a professional full-time gardener, should ever buy it. There'll be lots of people to come look when it goes up for sale, but it would not be for the weak of heart. Heating bills. Put that at the top of your list. Even if you let the house fall down around you, they'll just keep coming. We've installed new double-paned energy efficient windows. Caulked. Weather stripped. Built a solarium across 2/3 of the northern exposure of the home for solar gain, replaced the roof, put in a new boiler, converted from electric to gas heat (yes we had to pay to have lines ran), and placed gas grates in strategic spots to take off chill or use when it wasn't too cold. Use reversing ceiling fans to distribute the heat. We've cut our heating bill IN HALF as far as energy consumption. But, rates rise and will keep rising. We still have six hundred dollar a month heating bills in winter. And this is an old farmhouse. It does not have fourteen foot ceilings. It also is nowhere near 6,000k square feet. And, until we put a small fortune in the energy efficiency items, a draft from a window on one side of the room could blow out a candle on the other. It's comfy now, and even cool in summer so we don't need air conditioning, but for the first fifteen years of my marriage you needed a wet suit to take a bath. Think also about the bones of the house. Redecorating is great, but get somebody in there who knows construction really well to look at the skeleton of the house before you even consider buying it. The last two winters, we replaced the beams and joists under our kitchen and dining room. They were logs with the bark still on them, or logs cut on site and hand hewn to nearly square. They were ENORMOUS,and likely dragged into place by teams of horses. We needed to chain saw them to even think about getting them out. We had to gut these rooms clean down to the dirt underneath and after we got new joists up then replaced floors. Moolah. BTW, we never thought about replacing joists and floor beams in this house. After all, they'd withstood two centuries before us. Then termites happened. LOL. The roofer left about a hundred bats homeless when we replaced the slate for modern shingles. We've put in a new entrance box and had to rewire the whole house and it has solid brick interior walls. The logistics of running electricals, and the plumbing for the boiler system were staggering. If you see fuse boxes that should send up a red flag to check out the electricals for modern wiring. Moolah. We had to restucco over the seventy five year old stucco over the bricks. (major, major moolah) We've had to repair or renovate chimneys and it's hard to find brickmasons here who are familiar with the old craftsmanship. That's another thing about very old houses. Nearly everything in seriously old house is done by methods not common to craftsmen anymore and that includes materials. If you have to replace parts of woodwork it's going to be something like oak or mahogany and large. Not box store kickplates. My walls are so old, it's not even plaster on most of them, it's a sandy almost concrete covering. If we put together all the money we have spent in the last two and a half decades breathing life back into our wonderful old home, we could be living in a really fancy new one. We don't want to. We love our old home and pretty much know it inside and out by now. But, it's like a marriage and yes.............we are the volunteer caretakers to an historic old building we couldn't see being left to ruin. But, it's going to take a very special person to want the job after us. Now, ask me about the plastering schedule where the doors and windows are. LOL. Old houses just keep settling. Not a door in this house even resembles a rectangle. They all have been trimmed or had wood added to them to fit the openings. Every window was custom made and no two are the same size. The house is nearly regained its integrity now, and I can see the end in sight of the major issues. But, if we had been forced to sell this at any point along our long path of renovation, and somebody else had to pick up where we'd left off, if they knew up from down, you can take it to the bank our money and sweat wouldn't have left much room for profit. There'd have been no quick sells. The end results perfect for us. It's rustic yet and even has a pitcher pump in the kitchen to pull up the spring water for the house. But you always live with a foot in the past where people lived simpler and made do in some respects. Some people can do that. Some people can't. It fits our lifestyle well.........simple and hard working. But, it was purchased because my husband wanted an old large home in a rural setting. If he'd just wanted "room" it wouldn't have even been in the game. Good luck whatever you decide.

Timely discussion for me... I am in a major dispute with Raymour & Flanigan - big furniture and mattress chain in the northeast. I am 60, the hips are getting sore, my old mattress was old so I decided to buy new. Went to all the "mattress" chains, hoping not to spend more than $600ish. Went to Raymour and I walked out with a $1300 mattress. Almost immediately the mattress started to shift each night so that when I woke in the AM I had to be carefull not to fall of the edge on my bum (which I had done a few times). I thought maybe it was the risers, so I took those out. Thought maybe the sheets were too large. I Bought about 5 different styles of sheets - no change. So they send a service guy and he tells me I need to buy something to put between the boxspring and mattress. Told him I needed to talk with someone higher up, quickly. Regional office calls, they said all twins will shift. Said maybe I was to "big" for a twin, even after I explained I had been sleeping on a twin for over 20 years. If fact I gave my old mattress to my adult boy and he has been sleeping on it just fine. My main argument of course, was that if "all twins will shift" as she stated, I should have been told this at point of sale. So now I am talking to people on the corporate level. Waiting to see what they say. Will keep you informed. What I will say is that you really should listen to your friends as to what they do or don't like about their beds. Do research online, and when you do go to choose don't just lay on the bed for 5 min and say "okay, this is great" - and look at this like buying a car. Awful but necessary. BTW they were also trying to sell me on the gel bed. Too new on the market for me.

Mike, yes. They have to give me the wired ODT sensor so I can lock out the heat pump. This was discussed between them and I several times before I signed on the dotted line and they had assured me this was possible. So as far as I am concerned they have to deliver on it even if it required ODT sensor. I just found another issue as I dig into this mess. I was trying to understand the fan behavior. In particular, from the sound it seemed the fan always ran at one speed. I was puzzled and digging into the thermostat menus, I confirmed this. The fan was either 100% or 0% speed. And it runs for additional 1 minute or so after the compressor shuts off (cooling fan delay). I found this odd - why did I buy a variable speed blower and why was I sold one. I mentioned this to the dealer and could get a satisfactory explanation. And then I checked the install guide - and it was there (see attached, in particular the graph and the table). There are four settings one can choose from. To really benefit from the variable speed the jumpers on the inside unit need to be configured in so called enhanced mode (option 4 in the table) where the fan starts at 50% speed and then to 80% for about 1 minute (fast cooling); the fan then stays on at 80% for 7.5 minutes (dehumidification); if necessary, ramps to 100% to get to the set point temperature and stays there as long as required, and ; ramps down to 50% and then 0% over three minutes to extract extra cooling efficiency. Well, this is not how my system has been configured. Mine is configured as option 2 in the table - 100% fan speed, followed by 1.5 minute delay - there is no variability of fan speed that can kick in. I have call in to my dealer...

My preference would also have been NOT to have the staircase descend into the foyer (as if guests needed access to the private areas upstairs) but as it turned out there was nowhere else to put it. One complication was that we also wanted a basement (which will never be finished as it's my husband's workshop), thus the most space-efficient arrangement was to have the entrance to the basement staircase directly below the top of the main staircase. We started with one long flight descending into the living room, but my husband was concerned about getting drywall and furniture around the tight corner at the bottom. Plus the wedge-shaped wall would have made the TV and furniture placement awkward. Then we opted for a U-shaped staircase with a landing, also ending in the living room, but both the first two designs meant the door to the basement had to be in the foyer - which would have been even more weird. So this was what we ended up with (similar to ILoveRed's actually, but with all the private spaces at one end): I still don't like the narrow passageway between the bottom of the stair and the entrance to the living/dining area (about 30") but there don't seem to be any viable alternatives short of cutting into the ceiling and/or covering one or both front windows, and these would still leave the question of the basement staircase. We could simply eliminate the landing and have the stairs descend directly down another few steps, which would open up the space but this would put the bottom of the staircase behind the door, with just 2 feet to spare.