No, not the forums, Kathy and I.

(Although I am having the forums upgraded. They are working on them on a test server so we know everything is right before switching on the upgraded version).

We are moving from Florida to Maine, leaving this Friday morning (Feb.1). I know, odd timing with the crazy weather and the snow/cold up north. The timing wasn't our choice, the move is.

Because of the move I will have very limited access to the Internet until we get settled and find a way to get it into the house (likely satellite as cable doesn't run in rural areas like this).

We have a fair amount of work to do on the house, but we're very excited about it, because when we're done we will be able to host piano forums parties!

I'll check in when I can, and hope to be back on the air permanently in a couple of weeks.

Happy Transport!

Well, Maine is nice. I used to go there quite a bit. I have not forgotten that the State Bird of Maine is the blackfly. You can get t-shirts stating this. Their biomass far exceeds that of any other species, even the moose.

On the other hand, I like Florida also. You are in for quite a change in texture... and you may be able to personally advise those people who write to ask if a piano can survive in a room with a wood stove. A lot of people seem to want to know the answer to this. I forget, if Maine dwellers think three-and-a-half cords or five cords of wood will get you through the winter.

Pianos were invented when wood fireplaces were the last word in HVAC, but I am doubtful all the same.

I might move, myself, if I weren't so averse to it. To think, I used to do it professionally. And to think, those mighty vows I made on the last occasion, to possess nothing more than a laptop and a card table for future moves... all broken.

Hi Jeff,

We plan to use the wood stove in the living room very sparingly.

There is another wood stove downstairs in the family room we might use.
But the place also has oil heat, and I intend to watch the humidity/dryness closely.

Best wishes for the easiest move possible for you and Kathy and all your stuff, especially the piano!

Not sure about the State Bird but I DO have two beautiful Maine Coons cats that are just spectacular and I am told they are the official cat of Maine! I am a brand new member to P.W. and also an "old" beginner-at least I ahve a good keyboard to work with. Best of luck on your move.

PS: I live in Ft.Lauderdale....tough time of year to make the move north!

Best of luck with the move Frank!

James
x

Good luck! My wife attended Bowdoin College in Maine. Nice place.

Welcome to Maine! I'm in Old Orchard Beach.

Dear Frank,

May you and Kathy and all your possessions arrive safely in Maine unscathed, and in perfect condition. Whenever I think of Maine, I think of Stephen King. How about this ...a middle-aged couple leave their Florida digs with their old piano and cross over the Maine border as 20 year-olds with a new Bosendorfer! Think he could do something with that!

Best Wishes
Craig Sanders

We want pictures!

I love Maine ! I wish my So. Ca., thinned out blood would agree with the winters though. I'd love to get out of this zoo and re-locate somewhere that is less densely populated.

Best of luck with your move Frank. Hope you have a good mover for your new Estonia.

Yes, pictures and wishing nothing but the best for you guys.

Have a good and safe trip and have a good move!

Thanks for the kind words everyone, we appreciate them.

We would have preferred better timing for the move, but it's how it all worked out.

The address:

352 Moulton Hill Road
Parsonsfield, ME 04047

You asked for pictures, these would be the "before"...

Here is the listing, you can see it needs work, but we already know what we want to do, and in fact have
lined up the contractors and are going for an FHA 203K loan that includes the repairs/renovations.
http://www.trulia.com/property/3003144811-352-Moulton-Hill-Rd-Parsonsfield-ME-04047

Unfortunately the current condition is the pictures with no carpeting and in need of work (the house had been rented out and the tenants moved out without saying anything. The oil ran out, pipes froze and burst).

We can't wait until the renovations are completed, and my piano comes home.
Looking forward to hosting piano forums parties, reconnecting with old friends in the Northeast, and meeting new ones.

Back to packing the U-Haul now, we leave for Maine tomorrow morning (Friday, Feb. 1).

All the Best,

Frank & Kathy

Best wishes, Frank! Looks like the house has lots of potential.

Good luck with your move Frank. Excited to have you back in New England! I love the photos of the house! You'll fit right in in the state of Maine!

Paul

WOW! The time has finally come that we get you both back here in NE! I know the area well since my family's NH summer place is oh so very close and I grew up there during my teen years.

You will love it there. So beautiful, peaceful, and a step back in time.

We'll be up there when you name the party time! Maybe even before just to visit/help out.

I am so happy for you both!

A completely off topic hint for Frank.. and maybe other house owners..

If you ever intend to do better for your heating system:

check if you can use an earth lance with a salt-water mixture - for the purpose to "extract" the heat from down in the earth. If the soil under your home is supporting to extract heat there (this is not in every area possible..), so this would be the ever most economic way to heat a house.

A friend of mine uses such a system on the hills above the river Mosel in Germany near the border to Luxembourg. It costs him in deeply cold winters around 30-40 euro ct per night to have the whole big stone house (nearly 2.000 sq ft) heatened.

Such a system is a little bit costy related to investitions, and it needs experience with the drilling comp.. The heating boiler costs nearly same like an oil or gas system, additional costs are for the lance and the drilling into depths of 250 to 300 ft. This invest had cost him +8.000 euro i.e. around 11k USD. This had paid off for him after three to four years (...OK maybe because german heating energy costs might be a lot higher than in the U.S. ..).

The big industry normally doesn't like alternative systems because such a system sets the users free of oil or gas charges which will most probably increase in the next years steadily. The usage of oil or gas will keep the people dependent from the resp. pricing policy..

If I have the need to replace my gas heating system - I will install a heat exchance lance system. To heat a house then only costs some cents for electricity per night to drive the pumps. The heat down in earth is free for everybody.

Hmmmn,
So we can call for help when we get the POD delivered? :-)

Hi Frank,

Since I'm an IT nerd for my day job, why don't you use a smartphone with WiFi hotspot capability until you get satellite to your new home? It's certainly slower than cable broadband and you'd have to check the provider's range and bandwidth (can be pretty spotty in rural areas) but it might do in a pinch.

Congratulations and best of luck with the move! Looks like a beautiful home and I think I can guess where your Estonia will be placed.

You can PM me or email me directly if you have more questions.

Thanks J&J, I've ordered Dish Satellite to be installed Tuesday (our first full day in the house), didn't want to chance being without.

We are now in Dunn, NC (motel), working our way up to Maine.
Watching the temperatures drop as we continue our trip from Florida to Parsonsfield :-)

Great wishes with your move Frank!! Your house looks great!! It seems like the perfect house for hosting piano parties.

We are in New Haven, CT now. Getting close!

Ran into some snow showers in Virginia, I think it was the first time Kirby (the dog) has seen any snow. He kept staring out the car window at it.

Looks like it will be a bit cooler in our new place than it was in Florida. When we left Florida it was near 80, overnight in Parsonsfield tonight is supposed to be -1.

Last time I looked, the U-Haul trailer was still behind us, so at least we will have an airbed to sleep on tonight.
The house in Maine is empty, doesn't even have a refrigerator (although that may not be a problem considering how cold it is). Stoves are propane, but there isn't any propane yet either.

We feel a little like the pioneers. If we survive the winter, we should be fine :-)

"...We plan to use the wood stove in the living room very sparingly..."

Well, as the temperature drops en route, we can reminisce in advance about the real niceness of a wood fire in February, in Maine, whose latitude is so high that it is pitch dark by 4:00 in the afternoon from Thanksgiving on. And yes, past chilly; way past. Nothing warms you up like that wood stove, whose walls glow with that orangey-red which is toastiness itself once they've been fired up for awhile.

As I remember, the trick is to have a stove that is as close to airtight as possible, and in the middle of the house... though in Maine, I remember seeing a lot of steel drums that were re-purposed as wood stoves in log cabins. My Maine buddies, most of them, lived in cabins (though very nice ones; Herman's was two-stories and had a piano, and moose came right up to the porch), log cabins way in the backcountry. It made me appreciate living in a place where water that doesn't make you sick comes right into the house in a pipe--- hot, even--- and in which there is electricity. For, many of them lived by Coleman pump-up light six months out of the year, and spent their precious battery voltage listening to their lifeline to the outer world, NPR radio.

I suppose, if your living is a website, you will have electricity; therefore you can have a ceiling fan, which, moving slowly, seriously helps even out the room temperature from top to bottom, and side to side... for with stove heat, there are two sides: roasting hot, and freezing cold, depending on which side of you is facing the stove.

They have line-items in their budgets which many of us have never contemplated, like, visits from a bulldozer to keep their road in business, or scrubbing their stovepipes with chicken-wire Brillo pads so the tar doesn't catch fire inside them, and then there goes the house.

Anyway, the air-tightness. That means you can damp the fire way down, so it evens out the raving combustion that will make you break out in a sweat, then suddenly be gone, which makes you break out in salty icicles. You can even keep it going overnight, and fire up the morning coffee with some fresh wood over yesterday's coals. Herman could even, believe it or not, make excellent quiche on his wood kitchen stove (I understand it is not that hard).

If you can manage to have something like a Franklin stove with glass doors and iron shutters, it is both very fancy and very controllable. We blame Benjamin Franklin for the curse of so-called Daylight Savings Time (saving candles was his excuse), but he was a genius and he knew a thing or two about wood stoves.

Most Maine folks keep a pot of water going on their wood stoves, to help the indoor humidity... though I'm sure they won't have as close an eye on it as you will.

>> the trick is to have a stove that is as close to airtight as possible <<

Not so much anymore. Modern woodstoves, built to maximize heating efficiency and minimize particulate emissions, don't close down that far. We have a Vermont Castings Encore non-catalytic model, a midsize stove, and use it for most of our heat once the temperatures get low enough to allow its use. Here in southern Ohio it's enough to keep our furnace use down to half an hour or so on nights when the low reaches 5 F. The house is a little under 2000 square feet, well insulated and -- finally -- with all-new windows since last summer.

It took my wife, the carpenter in the family, a few years to get all four sides of the house done. We suffered through two winters of moderate smoking from the stove before I finally called the shop where we got it. When I told the lady there that we'd put on extra insulation and new siding, she said "unless you wrapped the house, too, that shouldn't make much difference." Of course we did wrap the house with Tyvek, and I can now testify that it really does cut down air infiltration dramatically! This winter we've been leaving a window cracked while we wait for the contractor to bore a new hole in our poured-concrete basement wall and install the fresh-air vent for the stove. (-: That's another nice thing about Vermont Castings stove (and probably others): it has a fitting for a fresh-air intake.

When the temps drop low enough, I load the stove up with locust or similar top-quality firewood before bed, and we still have significant coals left in the morning.

Andy

Kings books start out happy, but never end that way...the Bose would turn into Christine...

Good luck with the move. Just moved this year myself, but the opposite way, from cold upstate NY to warmer Raleigh, NC, area. We have a Maine coon cat, too, like another poster. Wonderful pet. She likes the warm weather, but also takes showers in the sink if you let her. Rain is not a problem with this breed, either. Keep warm. Hope you can keep the wood fire from hurting the piano. That can be a problem.

Best of luck on the move Frank. It's never fun. Missed hanging out with you and Kathy at NAMM.

what a gorgeous house and property! looking at the pictures, i wanted to move in! bravo on getting a steal.

did you manage to sell your place in florida? 80F, huh? mr. pique and i could head down and watch the place for you until things warm up around here.

congratulations on your move. there's no better place than maine, unless it is montana. and you are about to have such excellent neighbors, too.

one caution,however, if the only place you have to put the estonia is against one of those walls with the baseboard heater unit, it would be best if you disconnected that particular unit. and the wood stove could be a disaster for the piano, depending on the quality of the stove and how it is used.

i normally don't like damppchasers, but in your circumstances, if you don't already have one, it looks like it would be a good idea...

Thanks everyone.

There are up sides and down sides to everything.

We arrived here last night, the temperature went down to -1 and the oil burner wasn't working correctly (turns out the boiler has a crack, and something wasn't set right).
Because we don't own it yet (we are renting until the closing), the expectation is the seller will get it fixed.

There is no refrigerator, and we haven't had a chance to shop for one yet. Cell phone reception is spotty at best (so I couldn't use the phone to order a land line).

On the up-side, the area is beautiful, the night sky was so full of stars I nearly fell over staring up at them.
The people are friendly and helpful, and the Dish Internet got set up today.

We have a lot of work to do, but we knew that coming in. It will be worth it in the end.

More soon.