A Blue (and Green) Xmas with Radiators

Yes, that is my glowingly white xmas tree in my living room. All dressed up (mostly) in blue and green. Obviously you can tell it is FAKE. A big fat fake white tree. For years and years I held out against a "boxed" tree. For one---their fake and they look it. Two: the whole using up of resources for such a silly consumer thing made me feel as if I shouldn't do it---we have a number of times purchased live then planted them after xmas. Finally though when the allergies and asthma became to much we decided we would break down and buy one. Well, I decided if we were going to have fake---we were going to have the fakest of fake trees. How much more un real can you get than white? I mean really.
O.k---I could have gotten one of those blue ones. But I LIKE the white ones.
I will say since we live in a late 60's split level that the tree does sort of "go" with the whole mid century idea though. We have tried to remain somewhat true to the house during renovation and we like mid century modern. I also remember my grandmother having a white tree when I was little and many other people too. So if nothing else we can be "cool" temporarily and make a mid century statement. hehehe Which absolutely doesn't fit the whole farm thing we have going on outside the house.
By the way, since putting up the tree I seem to have that song "I'll have a blue xmas without you" stuck in my head----and it's probably now in yours.
Notice to the side of the tree is our "rad". Yes it sits a bit off the floor (all the better to dust under you dear) but will eventually have a nice rad cover over it---we just haven't decided on a style yet. The mission style that we see so commonly just won't fit a 60's split/ranch. So we will procrastinate for a while longer until some great idea hits us. My husband installed the complete heating system in this house. It is a hydronic system running off an on demand/instantaneous water heater plumbed almost entirely with pex tubing --my husband highly recommends the pex tubing. Eventually the water heater will be hooked into an evacuated tube solar collector , which should about halve our heating of water. We are pretty sunny here in the winter and evacuated tube collectors are very efficient at their job. We hoped to get them this year but it looks like it will be next year since we don't get any solar rebates from the state to help out with cost. It will all be out of pocket for us which means waiting while a few other expensive things get finished first. The man that built our house sited it to the south (with big windows) and so the longest part of the roof will be perfect for water heating when we can purchase it.
We also ran some of the heating pipes under the floors so we have a small amount of radiant floor heating and in the wall next to our garage we put tubing in the wall--which is wonderful when you come in from a very cold outside. When we were trying to decide to do wall tubing/heating we only found one article about radiant wall heating. The article it self was written by a man doing an experiment. Well, since then this is what we have decided: We would absolutely do wall heating again. We highly recommend it to others and as a matter of fact we wish we had done more walls and less radiators. We also think it is as good if not better than floor heating. Of course you have to pick walls were you won't have a lot of pictures--that is one downside (tiled bathroom walls would really work well). We also decided next time we would go ahead and send off to Europe for a really really nice knob to turn the heat up and down with. Of course you can also do thermostats but we just wanted to be able to turn it up down off very un complicatedly right at the location. I am a simple person at heart---hence the sometimes odd selections of thing.