My project for this wonderful spring morning is repainting a windowsill.

Um, hrmm. Did I say "repaint"? Sorry, I apparently mean "replace". Crap.

Actually, it's not so bad. I've mentioned before that my house has four layers of siding stacked onto it. At some point, this meant the windowsills needed to be extended to stick out past the siding. So the bit in need of replacement is a 2x2 sill extender that was rather poorly grafted onto the existing sill. (Judging by the face of the old sill, my house at one point had green trim instead of white.) I suppose that, if I wanted to do this right/best, I'd take out the piece underneath and put in one single sill, so that I don't have to go through my current process all over again in a few years.

In general, I believe it's worth utilizing materials to reduce energy consumption - both are, of course, subsidized heavily in our economy, but materials are much easier to reuse, salvage, or recycle in the future. (Note my statement of utilizing materials, as opposed to using (up) energy.)

With this in mind, and an annoyance at how quickly the hot water turns cold if I step away from the dishes for just a few minutes, I decided to look into insulating my hot water pipes.