Summer Project #3: Moving the propane tanks

When I purchased our home on Whidbey Island nine years ago (nine years?  It has been nine years?), it needed a new furnace.  Because electric heat was much more expensive than heating with gas in Bloomington, IL, where I lived, I had a propane furnace installed, using the (erroneous) logic that it was just a different form of gas and would be relatively inexpensive like gas was in Bloomington.  Wrong.

Heating with propane is not like heating with natural gas.  It is WAY more expensive.

But, that's what you get when you live on an island.  There aren't ways of transporting natural gas to an island.  Everyone here uses either propane or electricity or, if you have access to free wood and want to deal with putting wood on a fire all day, with wood stoves. 

Thankfully I had two wood-burning stoves installed so that most of the heat for the house could be produced by the trees that fell in our yard.  We like heating with wood.  It gives a warm feeling in addition to a warm feeling.  And oddly, it feels a little healthier, because we have to expend energy moving wood to the porch and then to the stoves.  Every little bit of exercise helps I think.

When the propane system was installed I was still living in Bloomington.  The large tanks were placed right outside the entrance to the home.  These two large steel barrels.  Very unattractive.  Even the large plants that were grown to hide them didn't work.  So there they were, nine years later, except rustier and even less attractive.

Time for them to be moved.  Summer Project #3.

Where to?

One option was to the back of the house.  But we didn't like that solution because we spend most of our time looking at the back of our house.  We decided they should go as far away from our views as possible, and still be close enough that the hoses that filled them could reach.

We also got freshly-painted tanks.  

Looks finished, but not.  The spot where the tanks had been needed cleaning up and repainting.

There was a vent for the crawlspace behind the tanks.  This vent needed to be closed for safety reasons.  We could have patched it from the outside, but that would have looked cheap.  So this meant patching it from under the house.

Patching this vent was a two-person job.  My job was to crawl, commando style, under the house with the tools, through cobwebs, my knees being skinned on rocks, being scratched with fiberglass insulation, working at an impossibly difficult angle.

Vicky's job was to take photos of my butt.

The new pipes needed painting.

The final piece was that the blue lids just had to go.

Finis!  

Doesn't it look so much better to have them hidden!

On to the next project!