Making Cents: Home Improvements

Writer / Kate Rhoten

Summer is here and home improvement projects are planned. Our family was preparing to get some of these long-desired improvements accomplished. Our projects included a new front door, porch post repair, and new flooring.

Nevertheless, just when things were moving along swimmingly, we had an unexpected disruption to our well-laid plans. Can you guess what it was? If you thought perhaps it was Murphy, you would be correct.

On one particular Sunday, my husband noticed there was ice forming on the pipes attached to our HVAC system. Then we looked at the outdoor unit. The fan was not spinning very fast. And to top it off, my husband was leaving on a business trip the following morning. So, the next day, I made the call to a residential and commercial heating and cooling company like Heating services with SALT to come to the house.

If you’re having issues with frozen heat pump in winter, these troubleshooting tips from BelRed may be able to help. You may also reach out to a trusted HVAC expert that offers heating replacement and repair services. For you to avoid costly damages and repairs of your heat pump, it’s best to trust some reliable professionals like the ones at Taylor heat pump maintenance services to come in and out of your home to get the source of any underlying issues.

The company came out and the wait for diagnosis was almost too much. You know what it’s like to wait for good news, like the birth of a new baby? Take that, flip it to the negative side and add the discomfort of knowing this may cost a chunk of change.

The ac service technician emerged from the basement and was ready to share the results of his findings. It was not good. There were many issues regarding our heating and cooling system. We are the original owners of our home and have lived in it for more than 14 years. On a positive note, he was surprised it didn’t happen sooner, based on the age of the system and what was installed in the home originally.

Our options were to do band-aid repairs every so often that would most likely cause us to spend more over time, eventually leading to replace the units individually, or replace the HVAC system now with the help of a local air conditioning contractor. If you have more that one repair to do inside the house, Handyman South Melbourne is the best man for you.

Have you encountered this situation? It is not cheap to put in a new HVAC system. We also had a thermal imaging survey conducted by Scantherm recently and they found some awful areas in our home where we were losing a lot of heat. So that has allowed us to get that fixed, so that thermal imaging survey has been a fantastic investment and saved us huge amounts of money.

As mentioned, my husband was travelling, so we had an emergency meeting over the phone to discuss our options. We opted to take care of the whole thing now. We also recently used some acoustic flooring from InstaAcoustic and the quality was supreme and very effective too, so look into that for acoustic flooring.

Having an emergency fund makes it much easier to make these decisions. The emergency fund is designed to keep a cushion of cash easily available for situations such as this or a loss of income. Having 3-6 months of income saved gives enough of a cushion to handle one of these unexpected, yet expected, homeownership events.

By having funds set aside, it keeps the initial panic of what to do from taking control of the situation. It also prevents debt from being created and paying interest for a necessary expense. There was no panic in our situation, but we did feel the pain of spending a chunk of our savings to make our home comfortable and more energy efficient. We’re ready for other emergency repairs such as pest control like bed bug treatment, roof repairs, etc.

Now we begin rebuilding the emergency fund and wait for the next Murphy visit. We’ve also found the Cheapest foundation repair ottawa since we already know it’s always just a matter of time and doing nothing about it is only going to make it worse. As it relates to homeownership, my father-in-law would say, “You don’t own your home, it owns you.” Boy did he get that right.

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