I haven’t had time to do much in the way of  a new Youtube video this week, and I think my pursuit of my next video project is more than I should have bit off. I was thinking of doing a quick video

about the history of Statesville similar to what I did with the large Mausoleums in Oakwood Cemetery. Taking some pictures of the big beautiful old historic houses and talking about who lived there, what they did, and any interesting history on the house. However, it appears that nobody in Statesville really knows anything about the historic houses. Except that they were at one time run down and the city put a concerted effort into protecting and preserving them and finding people who would buy them and take care of them. I’m going to continue my exploration of the history of Statesville, but I’m afraid it will probably be a fall or next winter video. In the meantime here are just a few of the houses I’m trying to find out about.

We made an amazing discovery about my house this month. The 2 guest bedrooms have always been extremely cold, and I’ve been told they are extremely warm in the summer. My niece Melissa believes it’s really because they’re haunted with a demon spirit that just keeps the room cold. That would make for a better video, but I’m not gonna buy into that one. I spoke to an HVAC guy who actually used to live here. And he suggested that he thought maybe there was a lack of insulation due to his attempts to warm the rooms also and not being very successful rebalancing the heating system. So I called an insulation guy to come and look at the attic to see if it had sufficient insulation and give me a estimate to add more.  And he discovered that the roof over the bedrooms, which is perpendicular to the main roof, is sealed off from the main roof  attic and so he could not check on the level of insulation above those bedrooms. Well, the house is vinyl sided  above the brick veneer and the gable ends of the roofs are just a thin sheet of perforated vinyl siding so that the hot air can escape. So I removed the gable end of vinyl siding to see if there was any insulation in that area. And not to my surprise, there was none. The ceiling of those two-bedrooms was just drywall separating the bedrooms from the cold outside. So the insulation guys came and blew about 24 inches of insulation in there (R-60?) and I’m hoping that will solve the cold and hot problems with the bedrooms. Here’s a couple of poorly done pictures before and after.

Another thing we have been semi-fighting with, now that we have 3 dogs living here, and it’s been raining 2 to 3 days a week, is the muddy yard. When the boys go out they just kind of meander around and find a few places to lift their leg and drop a pile and don’t track in too much mud except on the very bottom of their paws. Bonnie, the long-haired German Shepherd, unfortunately prances around and runs all over and kicks up quite a lot of mud into her fur. And so that gets tracked around the house and eventually becomes dust. I kid you not, I have changed the furnace filter twice because it was caked with orange mud. So I’m hoping that as February fades away we can get some grass seed down and maybe some hay and get things growing. We did drop some crushed stone and soil in a rather large mud puddle in the backyard to try to direct rainwater out of that area of the backyard. However Bonnie decided it looked like a great place to dig and tried to bury her soccerball in it. So more on the backyard coming up in a month or two.

And for all my followers who like to keep up with Caesar, he is really doing quite well. That is, when we go out and do something he has no trouble keeping up and he absolutely begs to go for hikes and walks and any outside activity. He unfortunately though is having a slightly tougher time in the house on the bare floors and so we have strategically placed little $15 rugs around the house. His real problem is probably more fear and when he gets to the bare floor he tries to run across them and that causes his feet to slip. If he goes slow he does fine, which is usually evidenced in the early morning when we go out and it is still dark and he can’t see where he is walking so he does not run. He got a bath this week because there was one day that it was in the 70s and he’s been a little on the sticky-slobbery side because Dakota drools on him and Bonnie chews on his neck and ears. So now he is all clean and fluffy and nice and he smells good too. He had his birthday last week, so he is now in the double digits for his age (10). Dakota will be 12 in June and shows absolutely no signs of slowing down, though he’s a pretty calculated user of energy anyways.

Well, that’s our update for this week. We will try to get a new blog every week along with a new video. Thanks for stopping by, feel free to leave a comment.

Rick, Caesar, Dakota