Soon, she heard him climbing up the stairs. He came through the doorway with a smile on his face.
“All set,” he said. “Like I figured, I’m going to bleed your radiators. I think that’s going to do the trick.”
“Oh?” Tess said. “Is that a big process, or . . . ?”
Wyatt shook his head. “Easy. It’s just a matter of turning a valve on each radiator to relieve the air pressure and let that air escape. It’s common in houses with hot-water heat.”
“Great!” Tess said. “Can you do it now? Do you have time?”
“You bet,” Wyatt said, fishing inside his tool kit and coming up with a small key. He smiled an infectious smile as he held it up to show her. “This is all I need.” He looked around. “I’m going to start at the other end of the house and work my way toward the kitchen,” he explained. “Do you want heat in every room? We can turn some of them off, if you’d like. Why heat the whole house if you’re not using it, right?”
Tess hadn’t thought of that. She turned it over in her mind. “I think we’ll heat the whole main floor,” she began, “but upstairs, maybe just my bedroom and bathroom?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Wyatt said.
“Can we turn on the heat pretty easily if I have people coming to stay?” Tess asked. “My son is coming for the holidays, and maybe earlier than that.”
“No problem,” Wyatt said. “You’ll be surprised how fast a room heats up.”
Tess smiled at him. “Okay. Let’s do it!”
Wyatt set off, and within an hour or so, he was back in the kitchen, bleeding the radiator there. It really was a simple process, Tess noticed. “Let’s go upstairs next,” he said. “You can show me which room is yours, and which you might want to heat for your boy.”
Tess pushed her chair back from the table and led Wyatt up the back stairs to her bedroom, silently grateful for the advice her grandmother had given her long ago, when she was just a child.
“Honey, always make your bed first thing in the morning,” Grandma Serena would say. “That way, you’ll start the day accomplishing something. One small thing. Then you’ll build on that.”
It wouldn’t do to let this stranger see her bed rumpled and unmade. Tess didn’t know quite why, but the sight of it would have felt too intimate, too personal. As it was, her bed was as tidy as any would be in the B&B she intended to turn this house into.
After her room and bathroom were handled and Tess could hear the heat hissing in the radiators, she thought it was a good time to talk about her other to-dos with this man.
“So . . . I have a couple of other projects that I need done sooner rather than later, and I’m wondering—can I show you what they are? Maybe you can take them on, or if not, maybe you know someone who can?”
Wyatt smiled, leaned against the doorframe, and ran a hand through his hair. “Sure,” he said. “What kinds of projects?”
She stepped through the doorway. “I’ll show you.”
They made their way down the hall to the shuttered door.
CHAPTER SIX
“This door leads to the back part of the second floor,” she said, as they stood in front of it. “I had the idea of renovating it into an owner’s suite, for me to live in when I open this place up to guests.”
“Oh? You’re making it into a B&B?”
Tess nodded. “That’s the idea,” she said. “I’m hoping to have it ready for summer, but I really don’t know what the renovation is going to entail.”
“So, you don’t know what condition it’s in?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never been back there,” she said. “It’s been closed off as long as I can remember. My grandmother had said something about it being too expensive to heat or maintain or something, and when my parents inherited the house, they just never bothered with it. We used it as a vacation home, so there was really no need.”
Wyatt ran his hand along the wooden door. “No knob, even,” he said. “It’s completely shuttered, then, not just locked.” He glanced back at her. “We could break it down, but that would be a shame, this beautiful old door.” He touched the doorframe and the hinges. “We could take this off entirely. Or—is there a back way in? Windows?”
She nodded. “There’s one room that looks like it was a sunroom or even a greenhouse. It juts out and has big windows on three sides. But they’ve been shuttered, too.”