A buddy of mine is obsessed with those house flipping shows. Four years he had talked about buying a fixer-upper and selling it but I never thought he would actually follow through on the idea. When he announced that he had bought a small Colonial on the edge of town to do just that I was surprised and I offered to lend him a hand if you needed one. I figured that demolition day would be fine anyway and I at least knew how to paint so I wanted to do what I could for him. After all, part of flipping a house means saving as much as you can during the renovation process and I figured free labor was always welcome. The whole process started in late October and with temperatures dropping I was wondering how we would be able to get everything done. There was plastering that needed to be completed before the place could be painted and that takes forever to dry even in warmer times of the year. I wasn’t sure what condition the HVAC system was in but I knew that we would be depending on it to help the process along. Each evening when we left he would turn the temperature up to almost 80 degrees to try and make sure everything was ready for the next day. With parts of the house completely gutted this ended up costing him a fortune but in the long run it was worth it. It took almost 8 weeks to complete the project but without the use of the HVAC system I am very sure it wouldn’t have been completed until spring. I never thought of a heating system as a tool but in this particular instance it was one of our most valuable ones.