this old house

Fixing something in an old house is like replacing a part on an old car. Once you get started, one thing leads to another and you have that '56 '57 '58 '59 Chevy that somebody wrote the song about.

We replaced our kitchen, which sorely needed replacement. That included the kitchen window, the ceiling, the floor all the way down the hall to the bathroom, the shelves and cabinets, the a/c ducts over the kitchen, and most of the appliances. And a new electrical panel to replace a panel with those funky old glass fuses.

Then we replaced the front door with a door that should withstand a hurricane.

Then the garage door began to disassemble itself after one of the two big springs went sproinggg, so now we have a new Miami-Dade rated hurricane resistant garage door.

Then the air conditioner died, after 18 years of faithful service. We could have just replaced the a/c unit but there's a nice tax credit if you replace the cooling and heating system with an energy efficient system. That meant taking out an oil furnace, new six years ago, and putting in a heat pump. With the tax credit, the cost difference was less than a thousand bucks. We lived without the a/c for ten days which reminded me how much fun it was to grow up in Florida without air conditioning. I didn't mind it then because we all got sweaty and we all smelled alike, but now I thoroughly dislike the high humidity.

All of this should make the house easier to sell someday if we (or our children) put the house on the market.

This gives new meaning to the expression, "I'm out spending my children's inheritence," but in this case it's all borrowed money. They might get most of it back whenever the house sells - which we sincerely hope will not happen for the next 20 or 40 years!