This house always manages to keep up guessing. Just when we think we have something figured out and under control, we find that we really don’t have a clue. Of course, since this is the first home we’ve owned and we are still learning to be “handy,” everything can turn into a major thing…

Downstairs in the room which used to be the dining room (now a pass-through to the office and kitchen) is a radiator which at some point during the renovation process lost its thermostat. We believe that Macky (our contractor) was working on it somewhere along the lines and apparently forgot to put the thermostat back on. Things were fine until a few weeks ago when it started warming up outside and we needed to turn off the heaters. This one was on full blast so we said we’d just grab another thermostat from a radiator that isn’t working (there are still a few that don’t work and there’s still no sign of that heater guy Macky promised…or Macky for that matter but that’s another story). Simple enough but somehow it still took us a few weeks to actually accomplish that task. There were just too many other things that always managed to come first.

So yesterday, S finally grabbed a thermostat from the extra room upstairs and slapped it on the radiator downstairs. We turned the radiator down, all worked great, very good. Check that off the infinite To Do list.

This morning I was doing various chores and cleaning things up around the house (my usual Monday ritual which also involves a whole lot of laundry, yippee) and I walked into the extra room to put some clothes away. When I opened the door, it was like walking into a sauna. Apparently when hubby popped the thermostat off the heater upstairs, it decided to start working. Thankfully the thermostat on the upstairs hallway radiator (which also currently doesn’t work – or so we think) was loose so I took it off to use in the extra room.

Try as I might, I haven’t been able to get the radiator turned all the way off…but I do think I at least got it turned down a bit. Perhaps by the end of the day, it will be all the way down.

Now we are wondering to ourselves if our problem over the winter wasn’t completely the heater pump not being strong enough or some sort of internal blockage, but that the thermostats on some of the heaters are broken and this led to the heaters not coming on. I’m not really certain how we would test that, and thermostats seem to be such simple creatures…

At any rate, we’ve been planning to buy some electric thermostats in the living room and bedroom which would hopefully help us get this whole temperature thing worked out. Plus we’d at least have enough thermostats to go around then. These two rooms are priority for the first trial with the electric thermostats since we spend a lot of time in there and the sun pours into these rooms during the day, causing the temps in the rooms to fluctuate like crazy, especially during the winter. So having a self-regulating thermostat certainly seems like a great solution.