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I don’t really know if winter gets harsher during some years as compared to others, but it seems this year winter is just plain miserable.  All I want to do is hide in my house, and even then its cold.  Bitter cold…

I’ve re-lit the pilot light in my water heater twice this year as it has spontaneously gone out.  The heater seems to run constantly, but the house never seems to be warm.  There were even a couple of days I left work early to head home because the roads were so bad that I didn’t want to travel after dark.  Just between us, there was a sick day that the only sickness was being sick of going out and shoveling a path out the driveway and onto icy snow covered roads.  I’m the type who goes to work regardless of how bad things get, but one storm this winter just went beyond where I felt it was safe to even attempt to leave the house.

So I’ve been sitting back and thinking about doing some remodeling to my old’ish house.  Probably shouldn’t be since I don’t have any money to do any remodeling, but still Its on my mind.  Today I did internet research on radiant in floor heating, and on tankless water heaters.  I plan to tile my kitchen in granite, relocate the cabinets to the opposite side of the room.  Switch to a cooktop and wall oven versus a conventional unit, and put in an island.

The majority of what I want to change about my kitchen I can do myself, but there are a few things I wonder about.  I could build my own cabinets, but I want to make this happen inside of my lifetime.  I just can’t see myself completing the task before I get bored and move on.  I can tile the floor and countertops, and I can handle the electric work and moving the water and gas lines.  I’m just not sure about what I should do before I get to putting down the tile.

I would love to install radiant in floor heating and from all that I read today I could do the task easily.  However after seeing all the “spin” and sales pitches, and thinking about how much it will actually be used, I don’t know if its worth the cost.  It seems electric radiant heating will likely cost four times as much as the vent system I have now to operate.  I was thinking radiant heating was a must because I’d read that granite tile floors are awefully cold without it.  I’m wondering how much I really would use that system though given its usage expense.  I’m a realist and putting on a pair of shoes beats a few thousand dollar improvement cost and a few hundred bucks a year in usage.  The problem is that I have to decide before I tile the floor.  I’m not spending a boatload of cash laying down expensive granite tile and then tearing it up next year when I decide the floors are freezing and I want to add heat.

My home is old enough that it has virtually no insulation.  I have full access to the underside of the structure through a crawlspace and I am thinking that a better investment would be to buy a few rolls of pink panther and staple it up between the floor joists beneath the kitchen.  One of the goals of my kitchen remodel I mentioned was to move the cabinets.  Right now they are located on the inside wall of the kitchen adjacent to a bedroom.  I want to move them to the outside wall surrounding a window.  The thought is that an extra two feet of cabinet covering the wall will provide more insulation where the cold litterally seeps through the wall and window area.  As a part of the process of putting in new cabinets I plan to tear the sheetrock off that wall and put the pink panther stuff in it.   I’ll then paint and finally hang the cabinets.  The cooktop and the kitchen sink will both sit side by side under the window.  The wall oven will sit to one side and the refridgerator to the other.  An island in the center of the room will serve as cooking preparation area as well as on the reverse side a dining table.  My whole design is based on making the kitchen attractive, and in refocusing the solid mass in the kitchen along the coldest wall.  Thus the dilema on the in floor heating.  I want the kitchen to be warmer.  I want the whole house to be warmer.  But the reality is I don’t want it to cost more to operate.  That beats the point of adding efficiency with improvements.  Also when it comes down to it I’d rather the kitchen be a bit cold than the living room or bedrooms.  I guess I’m just missing the real life experience of how cold a granite kitchen floor really is.  If I knew firsthand I could make the decision in a heartbeat, but all I know is wives tales I’ve read. 

I guess the solution might be to spend the extra $2000 for an electric system and then not use it when I realize it is costing me so much to operate.  That really sucks though concidering I can’t afford the $2000.  That 2k would be better spent on a tankless water heater that “will” pay for itself and provide benefits I can actually use.  (like a warm shower that lasts longer than five minutes.)

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