Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Continuing on with my story about my home plumbing adventures, we have reached an interesting impasse with our plumbing (the house not my plumbing).

To recap, a simple gasket repair has evolved into a plumbing leak, which caused me to open a large hole in my front hallway ceiling. My wife and I are now are at the point where we have a turned off toilet (at the water valve) a hole in the ceiling and an innate fear of turning the water back on (for the toilet).

Today’s Financial question is: Is Fear a tool, or an impediment?

How many times have you not done something in your financial world because you were afraid of the consequences? Did it turn out that because of this fear you:

1. Didn’t do something that you would have regretted later (and thus fear was a good thing)
2. Didn’t take advantage of something that you now regret (i.e. fear became an impediment and it stopped you from succeeding).

Advent Financial Calendar Box Day 4

This is a trick day because yesterday’s box in a box, is actually today’s box (i.e. Safety Deposit box). What is in your Safety Deposit box (or home safe)? Don’t know? Let’s open the Safety Deposit box and look what is inside and make sure that:

• Whatever is in the box is up to date
• Everything you thought was in the box is there
• You have a list at home of what is in the box currently (which is up to date), and you know where the key is for your box as well (also very important).

Yesterday Mrs. Caj and I discovered that our upstairs toilet’s wax gasket was not working and thus it was leaking, so we decided that this was a home repair project we could tackle (we have actually done it before). We have the Time/Life book of complete home repair which does explain in detail how to fix this problem, so I went off to the Hardware store and picked up two wax ring gaskets (or flanges).

Why Buy Two?

Simple, I know my inability to do anything correctly (when it comes to home repair or improvement) the first time. I do usually succeed on the projects I attempt (I don’t try things I know I can’t do), but I usually mess it up the first time, so I have learned the importance of buying back up parts for the project.

This home repair would have cost well over $100 if I could have found a plumber that would have come in on a Sunday, but in the end cost me $13 (for both flanges). It also needed to be done, given the toilet is on the second floor of our house, and this kind of a leak can really make a mess of the main floor ceiling and possibly compromise the home’s structural integrity (water damage to trusses). We also replaced the toilet flapper which caused water to leak, which cost me money as well (water bill).

My wife and I were also still talking to each other afterwards (occasionally we quibble in these kind of projects as well). 

Advent Financial Calendar Box Day 2

For your Financial Advent Calendar, today’s box has a slip of paper in it:

Day 2: Investigate and open a TFSA account for January 1 2009. 

Sort of a Financial Christian Fortune Cookie, really.

That was the question of the weekend for us. Yes, the snow is now gone and we can actually look at our back yard and wonder how we are going to get that all cleaned up (but I digress). The other issue, was whether we should buy a new Bar B Q (about a $175 - $450 expense) or try to replace the ruined burner (made of aluminum, and rusted through to the point of being a safety hazard) which would cost anywhere from $24.95 to $52.00.

Now normally I would just open my wallet and buy a new bar b q, but I knew that although it sounds much simpler, there is a great deal of “assembly” still to do. The replacement of the burner could be fiddly and complicated, but it would still be simpler than building the entire bar b q (remembering I was going to have to do that with a new system as well). The replacement would also mean I had to clean out the bottom of the bar b q (with the shop vacuum, so it wasn’t as bad as I thought).

I was about to buy the common garden variety cheaper burner replacement, when I saw there were cast iron versions of these devices as well. I reached for it and felt how heavy it was, and that made me want to buy it. The aluminum version seemed flimsy in comparison, and I have done this replace with an Aluminum burner before, and wasn’t very impressed with what I got (it was better but not much better).

We ended up buying the $50.00 cast iron burner, along with some new lava rock, and after doing the job 4 times, and getting out a hack saw, the whole job was completed, with a minimum of swearing and arguing (which was a good thing). My guess is the burner will last a good long time, in fact I may have to remember to remove it, when I finally dispose of this bar b q, but we have used it a few times, and it seems to work to our satisfaction, and it does not make the grill look like a flamethrower either.

For my regular readers (you know who you are), this past summer I spent a while hunting down roofing contrators in the Ottawa area, to get my roof replaced. This usually entailed me having someone see how lousy my roof looked from the street and knocking on my door (which gave me a very strange cross section of quotes, let me tell you). I then phoned a bunch of contractors and found out that thanks to the building boom in Ottawa, no one likes to do 1 roof much (except for the guys that wander around giving out quotes to people’s who’s roofs look like crap).

I came across a new web site for the folks in Toronto (yes the GTA, or as we call it in Ottawa, The Big Smoke), which will help you get quotes for your home renovation,Toronto Roofing Quotes which looks interesting. It helps you get quotes from up to 5 contractors in the GTA to get a home renovation job done. The site only gets you quotes, you choose which contractor you want to go with (and checking with the Better Business Bureau for your area, is always a good thing to do in this area (I have watched enough Holmes on Homes to know that one)). I can’t use the service, because, I doubt these contractors want to come up the 401 to replace my windows (this coming summer’s money pit), but if you live in Toronto (Big Smoke, or Toronto the Good) and need renovation, this would be a good site to start your renovation contractor search with.

Now I must put a caveat that I am getting paid to say this by PayPerPost, but I have checked out the web site, and it looks like a good idea, wish we had one in Ottawa.

–C8j