As my regular readers know, my home is starting to reach the magic age when everything starts to need replacing (it’s about 16 years old).
The furnace has been giving us problems, mostly due to it’s standing pilot, the air circulation to the basement must be constricted because the pilot continues to blow out (and last year it actually broke). The furnace also seems to be a little underpowered for the size of the house. The air conditioner was not well last year, and this year it continues to work, but runs almost all day long (so it needs to be replaced as well).
The roof is leaking (luckily only over the front door), but at least that part of the roof needs repair and the rest of the roof definitely needs to be replaced very soon.
The basement still needs to be finished (a bit of an in joke with my friends, since I have been finishing the basement for about 5 years now). We await my father-in-law to help us finish things off (mostly), there is no problem with procrastination here.
More than 1 person has said to me, “Why don’t you just buy a new house?”. I think it’s time to put together a scenario with some numbers to compare this (as a note these will be made up numbers and no, I will not be moving unless something catastrophic happens).
Stay tuned
Well, we bought a 17 year old home exactly one year ago. It needed:
new roof
new furnace
new waterheater
complete paint job inside and out
new carpeting throughout upstairs
all new light fixtures
additional light fixtures
various electrical repairs
new garage door opener
new swimming pool cover and assorted supplies
new appliances
new shower in master bath
assorted plumbing changes including new faucets in all bathrooms and new toilets that actually flush and don’t clog
plus hundreds of $100 to $300 small repair jobs I can’t even begin to list here
Exclusing new furniture, we figure we spent $35,000. We paid $50,000 under list price but had a lot of aggravation. Was it worth it? Tough to say. We could have spent an identical amount on a brand new home but then had no landscaping and we would have to live in an immature building zone for a number of years.
I think I’m still on the side of renovation.