How to tell it’s summer in Boston

Just as spring in the Boston suburbs is heralded by the appearance of mud and street sweeping trucks removing the sand from the roads, so summer is heralded by clear signs:

  • The temperature spontaneously jumps about twenty degrees overnight.
  • Upstairs floors in un-air-conditioned houses become uncomfortably hot, even if the outside temperature is only in the low eighties.
  • There are major home contractors in every other house on your block.

Our house is no exception. With a little luck, our HVAC contractors will be working next week to get our air conditioning installed. It’s exciting for us: not only will this be the first Unico system we’ve been involved with (aside from seeing them on This Old House), it’s also the first time we will have owned a house with air conditioning. Very exciting times, indeed.

I’ll post more details over the weekend. We have some exciting demolition work to do; we agreed that we would tear out part of the basement ceiling in the boiler room to make way for the central trunk. My hand is healing nicely, but I guess we’ll find out if I can handle a reciprocating saw left-handed—or whether Lisa can manage ceiling work.