The Happiest Day of My Life

You might think the happiest day of my life was my wedding day. Or the days that my children were born. But you would be wrong. Oh sure, those are close runners up, but the happiest day of my life is today. Because today I am getting AIR CONDITIONING!!!

For those of you who don't know, I live in an old house. Really old. Built in 1895. It pre-dates vents. It also predates insulation and common sense. When radiators were installed for heat, they were only installed in some of the rooms. The kitchen doesn't have a radiator, the bonus room doesn't (it is our media room/office/playroom/guest room), and Daphne's room doesn't. That means in the winter we have to control the heat in those rooms with space heaters. On, off, on, off, don't forget about them and burn the house down, don't let the kids char their fingers on them. Not that fun. And the lack of insulation on the second floor means it is 20 degrees colder up there in the winter, and 20-30 degrees hotter up there in the summer. I am not exaggerating. And since we don't have vents, we also don't have A/C. This house had an ancient swamp cooler in the living room window when we moved in. We added a window air conditioner to our bedroom. That was nice except for the fact that it's about as quiet as a semi driving through a tunnel. So all summer long we would rotate in 1 hour shifts between lying awake listening to the air conditioner until we couldn't stand it (but were cool) and lying awake sweating to death until we couldn't stand it and got up to turn on the A/C again. Then 2 years ago we upgraded to a roof-top swamp cooler that blew air through the upstairs hallway ceiling. That helped somewhat. And some of the air actually made it down the stairs and into the kitchen. But I still avoided baking anything since it would cause shimmering heat mirages to appear on the counter tops. You can see that the heating/cooling situation in our house has been less than ideal. And short of spending $10,000 to rip up our entire house to have vents installed, it didn't appear that there was much we could do.

Enter Mr.Slim. My husband discovered an externally vented heating/cooling system made by mitsubishi called Mr.Slim. Outside is the heating/cooling unit. Much like your standard air conditioning units outide, but way...slimmer. It runs pipes up the outsides of your house (very attractive, I'm sure, but worth it) and into your house. Then each room you're applying it to gets a wall unit to control the temperature in that room. Significantly less expensive than ripping up our house for vents. So today they are putting it in. One in the kitchen, one in the playroom, one in Daphne's room. I am going to be cool in this house for the first summer ever! And this winter, I will be warm.



Even the box that it came in has proved useful for child care purposes.
See? Happiest day of my entire life.