Baby, it's getting cold outside!

Brrrrrr!! It's a cold day when your house doesn't have a roof. Or windows! 

Thanks to a few cm of snow, we were up at the crack of dawn and out to the house to shovel. Winter is here... I'm fine if this week is just a preview and we go back to 15°C weather again. 

Just shoveling out my kitchen... No big deal. :)

We want to keep as much moisture off the subfloor as we can. And we also need to keep our foundation and basement flooring from freezing. That seems like an impossible task with no roof, no windows, no insulation, and snow. 

So today we bought a propane heater and boarded up our basement windows and the gaping hole that will one day be stairs to the basement in attempt to keep the foundation around zero degrees. We left one removable piece on the door so we can still get in and out easily. 

Jake hammering 2x4s into frozen clay to keep the plywood over the windows in place. I think he had fun :)

All boarded up!

We went with a Mr. Heater Convection Propane Heater. It's 30,000-80,000 BTU and can heat up to 1900 square feet. A 20lb tank (a regular BBQ tank) is supposed to last up to 14 hours. We don't need to have the basement warm, just not below zero.  We decided to get a 30lb tank so that we can squeeze a few more hours out of it while we're at work. 

So after we got the house all boarded up we assembled the heater and tried it out. 

Our plan is to keep it on the lowest setting possible to preserve the tank, assuming that it provides enough heat. 

Once we fired the heater up, we were surprised to see a huge flame! It made us both a little nervous. We kept trying to reassure ourselves that it was fine, the flame was contained and that these heaters were made for this sort of thing. We boarded the house back up and got in the truck. Neither of us were feeling overly comfortable about leaving a propane fueled metal fire pot in the basement of our new house so we called my dad for reassurance. 

The first thing my dad asks, "You've got insurance, right?"  

We do, but that wasn't the reassurance we were after so we quickly went back inside and shut it off. We'll give it another try when we're out there cleaning up this weekend before we trust it alone!  Thankfully the propane heater is supposed to be a temporary solution until we have our own hydro. Then we can use electric heaters and we might actually be able to sleep at night!