I'm pretty sure I was recently at a Costco around here with tubes.

ETA: google agrees with me.

What neighborhood were they in, ita? Sounds like maybe Bayou St. John? Or Park Island?

A carriage house would be nice, too. With a second floor full of bedrooms for staff guests.

Having stayed in a youth hostel that was a converted carriage house, not so much.

ION, I'm sure everyone's been wondering what Vanilla Ice has been up to....

Vanilla Ice Lighting, Rapper Unveils Designs for Chandeliers & More

My great-grandmother had a wood stove in the kitchen, and she still cooked on it.

My great-aunt did too. That was a 1900s frame house that held three generations of one family, plus a boarder. The room you entered from the front door was the largest room in the house, and aside from the enormous oil furnace vented into the fireplace chimney, there was no furniture, and it was used only as a passthrough. Living room isolated on one side accessed through a door into the entry room. Bathroom and stairs, accessed through the entry, downstairs room which had been intended as the dining room but which my cousin and his wife used as their bedroom, and through which you had to pass to get from kitchen to the rest of the house. Upstairs, another bathroom, three bedrooms, one of which was rented to the boarder, and a linen closet. Never really a comfortable house.

My boss had a pre-1900s house in the country which the previous owners had been dragging into the 20th Century. Insulation had been added to the downstairs walls on the inside, and the interior walls resurfaced with naked plywood sheets, over which ran metal electrical conduit carrying wires for wall outlets. I suggested the wash the walls in colors they liked and pretend they were paneled with moire' silk. They had a newly-installed bathroom off the kitchen, but it never worked at high volume. So for parties, they spruced up the outhouse. I've used outhouses at the campgrounds where we tented, and my mom's mountainfolk kin still had outhouses. But my boss' outhouse was amazing. A two-holer, so it was spacious. They installed a stained glass window, so it was light and pretty inside, walls and ceiling whitewashed, floor swept. There was a little shelf with a vase of flowers and a solid air freshener, and brackets for the TP--the good, soft, multi-ply kind, because there was no plumbing to clog. There may have been a moment, or two, when I sought refuge from the chattering horde of the lawn party in the outhouse.

Having stayed in a youth hostel that was a converted carriage house, not so much.

The one a cousin in Saratoga had was awesome. And the girls used to roller skate on the ground floor.

I do cook on our woodstove. It's a heat stove, but I bought the kind that has a graduated top, so there are two different surfaces, basically, boiling and simmering, when I've got it going right.

Mostly I just boil water, though. I keep it boiling all the time, and it serves as humidifier, and then when I want a hot drink or need to defrost the birdbath, it's already hot.

Aunt Effie would just use the iron handle-thingy to pull the flat cover off so there'd be a hole in the top of the stove, and set a kettle full of soup or stew right down into the fire and let it simmer all afternoon.

Friends heated their suburban house with a woodstove. Of course he also converted their diesel Land Cruiser to run on post-consumer crude he collected from some first-use source. They're in West Virginia now, raising sheep, shipping meat, fleece, wool, yarn, and woven yardage and goods nationally and internationally, over the internet. It is what you make it, I guess.

We had a whole house vacuum like Theo's talking about in BR, it was excellent at sucking up cockroaches. No basement, of course, so the compressor was out in the boat garage (we didn't have a boat, but that's what the realtor called it and we kept calling it that, I guess, it was a shed on the other side of the carport, basically). I still didn't like vacuuming, having to wrangle the tubes all over, but never having to empty bags or replace burnt out belts was nice.

You aren't sick are you? I am on day two of the cold from hell.

No, although I'm sorry that you are! My plans for sleeping forever and watching DVDs this weekend are now totally preventative care.