My daughter Erin, whose work appears in these fine pages from time to time and who, with her three sisters, grew up listening to me talk nonstop about hydronic heating, bought a house with a furnace.
This house is in a hilly, wooded neighborhood near Silver Spring, Md. The house was a foreclosure and was even featured on one of those reality TV shows where they try to dress an old house to make it look delicious to potential buyers. The husband on the show was a general contractor and we got to see how lovely the place looked before he ripped out most of the kitchen cabinets and other worthwhile objects. He then stopped paying the mortgage and declared bankruptcy. Reality can be rough.