The road to homeownership can be trying.
Many times, when you purchase a home that was built years before, it comes with a personality of sorts of its own.
There are normally some things that need to be fixed and some that need more attention than others. This was the case with my grandparents house. It was left to my wife and I after their passing and we were very excited at first. The house had been in the family for nearly sixty years and at least it would remain so. We moved in during the summer so we had plenty of time to get before our first winter. We made repairs to some of the windows and doors to make sure they were properly sealed, added more insulation to the attic, and wrapped the pipes in the basement to help conserve energy when the heat was on. In September, we called the local HVAC dealer to have them check out the furnace. The technician arrived and said that he had been expecting a call from us. When I inquired why, he said that the furnace hadn’t worked well for several years and my grandparents hadn’t wanted to put any money into replacing it. Had I known this before, I would have tried turning it on when we first moved in. All the money we spent winterizing the house would still be helpful, but, now, we had to invest in a new HVAC system too. This was one of the few “personality” traits that we had not counted on. At least the house itself didn’t cost much but we have been fixing so many things that it may as well have.