We Bought A Money Pit!

One year ago we bought a money pit, I mean a house in Oklahoma. We were so excited because we were starting our Fully Funded Lifestyle Change, I was quitting my job, and we were moving to the country! Well, we got the country alright. I sit outside and watch the birds at the bird feeder and in the trees around the backyard. I watch a pair of does come wandering thru the yard in the morning and evenings. They’re around so much the dogs have stopped barking and the doe wanders to the fence to check the dogs out. It’s hilarious! They’ve both figured out that even though their base instincts say “enemy!” they both know the fence keeps them safe. I caught a pygmy rattlesnake, and scared up a 5’ ratsnake that lives in a woodpile on the back corner of the property that I haven’t cleared yet. We have a hawk that likes to fly thru our yard in the afternoons and I saw it actually grab a mouse/vole idk, off the ground one day! It was awesome!

But none of that has cost us any money except for birdfood. It’s the “aaahhhhh” benefit of living out here. So what were we expecting with this house? It’s 16 years old, it had a 2 and 4 yr old AC and furnace respectively, 3 yr old roof that seemed to be in good enough shape. The home inspection report (what a scam industry) was pretty clean and didn’t note anything of significance. We had a home warranty for a year to cover anything major. How did we still manage to spend over $50,000 in the past year? With all of the following fixes and updates.

HVAC IS Spendy

Our HVAC started having problems from when we moved in. The units were 2 and 4 yrs old so we didn’t expect we’d have problems with them, but no. Hahahaha, no… First they couldn’t keep the house cooler than 83/84 for most of the day if it got above 93F outside – this sucked. I wrote a whole post about it, so I won’t belabor it, except to say we replaced them both for about $9,000 after also replacing an additional damper, a control unit, and currently we’re replacing another damper ($350) as I type this. I was SO tempted to just do this myself as I can get a newer Honeywell damper/actuator for $139 on Amazon and t’s a swap out, reseal, and rewire the 2 wires. Should be easy peasy right? Mrs SSC didn’t want to gamble that I’d mess it up and we’d still have to call out the repair guy.

While the cheaper AC guy has had his little setbacks like not swapping out the liquid gas nozzles for propane nozzles… I think this directly contributed to cracking the coil, so guess what, we got an even newer furnace with better design since our last one went in, lol. Even burning $500 worth of propane in 3 weeks cost way less than the other vendors though. Shopping around saved us a lot of money for the system we got and its been working well so far.

Carpet, Always with the Carpet

We knew the carpet would need to be replaced but thought we might get another year or so out of it. That approach has worked out well for the bonus room, but not so much downstairs. Mrs. SSC had crazy bad allergies and asthma since we moved in using her inhaler multiple times a day. We had the vents blown out/dusted/cleaned (~$600), I beefed up our HVAC filters, but nothing. We changed the carpet and almost immediately, her lungs got better. Yay! Big win for the health boost, but $5000 cost for the carpet. We also got a better inside air filter that has worked amazingly and clears our living room/dining room/kitchen open air once an hr at least ($600) and a smaller one for the master bedroom ($200).

So Much Land/Brush Clearing

We knew when we got this property it was wild, undeveloped and had been turned into the kind of property you’d find a body hidden on, or inspiration for a new Grimm’s Fairy Tale. I was gifted a brushcutter for my birthday, and it was a godsend! That thing has been amazing. My Echo chainsaw my FIL gave my about 9 years ago finally died… You can read about that here. It got replaced with a Stihl chainsaw with 18” bar ($400) and OMG that thing rocks!! With my old saw, I’ve gone thru 3 blades, 1 tune up kit, sharpener, and some other minor things ($120). I’ve cut down well over 100 trees since moving in. Some were big, >6” diameter, but most are less than 4” diameter and were just crowding each other out. The bigger trees were similar, where I’d take the ones that were crowding the more successful trees that probably grew there first or fastest, lol.

This was in the fenced in part when we put in a fence. See the back window?
Goodbye old friend. Thanks for the work!

The hauling of the brush has been spendy, but not as bad as I expected. The first round was $1300 for the front yard and some other random stuff I’d gathered. The next was $1280 and then $2560. I’ve had 1 more haul off from my Cinco de Mayo cedar cutdown party, it was really just me cutting down six, 30’ tall cedars and stacking their limbs… That was $1280. I had that guy take out another 15 cedars, some were really big ones, and about 10-15 small overcrowded trees. That ended up at $3200 to get those cut and hauled off. After that, I’m down to maybe an acre or so left to clear. I’ve been able to mow all the spaces I’ve cleared, and yes, it’s mowing “forest” and not grass, but that’s okay. The cedar removal will open up more sunlight and I can put down some grass in the fall, similar to the front. Plus, I can let the native plants grow too and see what does better.

The front yard is doing well. I mean, it looks like a yard!

Except for that last round where the guy cut what he hauled away, I’ve done all the rest of the work of clearing myself. To have someone else do it is spendy, spendy, spendy. We’ve paid $8120 so far, just to have brush/trees hauled off. That stuff adds up for sure. Since the burn permits are so infrequent, I wasn’t able to burn as much as I wanted to and go the free route. Oh well.

Landscaping Is Never Cheap

We learned from our LA house that if we’re going to do improvements to the house, we should do them sooner than later. We did this in our Houston house and it worked well and we did the same with this house. The backyard was a red clay, mud pit and the dogs liked to run circles around the bush out there, and then the clay was getting tracked inside… Plus that bush blocked the view and made the backyard seem claustrophobic. With the green wall of doom gone, this should be a nice open view. We relocated the bush and had flagstone installed. It’s a way more inviting environment to slowly sip my coffee, but it was $9000 flat. Yipes!

What a difference! So much clearer! So much work!!

Energy Efficiency

Last fall, Lowe’s had 30% off on insulation, so I spent $1300 to beef up what was already here. 24 bats worth of R-30 insulation. It only took about 3-4 days of crawling around to install it all, but man, it did a great job and cut out some of the hot and cold spots we dealt with last summer! The Master bedroom is no longer an oven, and the same with our guest room. I was expecting to have to add another attic vent over the Master bedroom to vent the trapped heat, but nope, it just needed insulation to block that heat. Shocking!

When summer hit, the astragal (the faceplate of French doors) on our back door broke. It split the wood core of that door. I repaired them and was making it nice and pretty but Mrs. SSC decided we should just replace them. Mainly because they have very low energy efficiency rating, they faded the wood in front of the door, and you can feel the heat or cold when you get within 2-3 feet of those doors. Since they’re 12 feet wide, that’s a lot of heat and cold coming and going and making us spend more money to combat it. Also, you can see daylight between the doors and under the doors in 3 places, even with me adding new weather stripping and trying my damnedest to plug those leaks up.

I don’t understand people that are FI and won’t spend money making their houses more energy efficient, but that’s not us! We opted for a 3 panel, minimal trim, high UV/energy efficient rating, sliding glass door. Bonus, it has a retractable screen so we can actually keep the door open for the breezes once spring and fall hit! It wasn’t cheap, at a cost of $7200, but paying all at once saved us $73, so yippee?

We also replaced our main 3 windows we know have similar heat/cold issues for $5900. Two of those windows are the largest windows we have in the house, and they have arches, so… yeah. Replacing two 3’x5’ arched windows is spendy! These windows are the bonus room window (2’x4’), the office window which feeds heat to the bonus room (it’s at the bottom of the stairs) and the dining room window, adjacent to the soon to be new sliding glass door. I solar filmed all the windows last summer early on, and it made a big difference, but man… That office window and bonus room window still give off heat like an oven. I’m excited to have it all installed in a couple of weeks.

For the door and windows, we went with Pella for 3 reasons (no affiliate link, lol). They make and install their own products, their warranties are badass, and their energy efficiency is amazing, even for their “low end” products. While it’s maybe not the cheapest route we could have gone for replacement of the door and windows I feel good about it because I know or expect I’ll be getting a good product, a big energy efficiency boost, and a great warranty on all of them.

Septic System and Water Softener

We have a sprinkler aerobic style system and have spent close to $700 over the last year rebuilding the aerator, among other things, and replacing sprinkler heads. All in all not too bad, but it seems like there’s always something with this system. The repair guy introduced himself with, well, a system this age, everything is going to start breaking down… Thanks for justifying your job, septic guy. Eyeroll…

Our water softener guy was a little better. He came out checked everything and said, “Yep, your brine pump is shot, your timer’s broken, and some other smaller things need tweaking. I can rebuild it all and have it running well for $350 or I can “band-aid” it for $75 and call me when it breaks again, your call.” We had him rebuild it and haven’t had any issues with that since last fall, so woohoo!

Electricity, Who Needs It

We had a breaker go out upstairs, but fortunately, it was one of the things covered in our home warranty. It was only $75 but there was no electricity for half of upstairs for a month. Yay, speedy home warranty repair service. Also, we had 3 outside outlets go out and I replaced them myself, easy peasy for only $90. I’ve also swapped out our entry light ($80) as the original was 80’s brass and rectangular glass pieces and was hideous. I did the same with the dining room light, and used an old chandelier from our Houston house. We swapped it out for a fan/light and kept it in the attic and now we use it here. Yeah, free!

More Yard Costs

Last but not least, how could I forget our fenced in yard and early on brush clearing. We paid $6k for a portion of our back yard to be fenced in prior to arrival and to do that, they needed to do some clearing to have room to install the fence. The clearing for the fence and fenced in area was $1500. I still spent ~10 hrs+ clearing it more once we got here, but that was the other big spend on the house before we got here. Grass seed ($200) gets expensive, but I should be done with what I have, at least for this year. Neighbors say you constantly put down grass seed, but it makes me think I need something more sustainable to live here, so we’ll see. We also bought a storage shed to make the garage more usable. It was a used shed we got for $3500, but still counts as spending.

Things NOT Updated

The Kitchen is still the big one. We bought a new fridge for $1800 (I will never buy any Whirlpool anything ever again, they’re dead to me), but the dishwasher is 17 yrs old, the oven, microwave, and cooktop are all same age/vintage, and that sink has got to go. It’s functional, but I miss my single basin non-white sink. The counters are formica, which Mrs. SSC was initially wanting to replace sooner than later, but that’s not happening for a while now. That will be spendy if we replace them all at once. Plus, with no bonuses anymore it may be a while before we decide it’s worth selling assets to replace. Carpet upstairs still needs to be replaced, but since its just the kids and I that use it, that will wait a while. We still want to paint some more of the rooms, but that can happen whenever.

Total Current House Spend:

HVAC: $9,850

Carpet: $6,400

Energy Efficiency: $14,400

Back Patio: $9,000

Electricity: $245

Water Softener: $350

Septic: $700

Woods Clearing: $11,640

Yard: $9,700

House Misc.: $2,800

Total: ~$65,085

Summary

Holy hell, that’s a lot of coin! When I started this post it was at $30k, and then I remembered a few more things and it went to $40k, then to $50k, and after replacing the door and windows we’re now at $65k for spending. Makes me a bit nauseous really when I think about it. Next post will talk about the house decisions and how that figure blew up so quickly. We had money earmarked for renovations, upgrades and whatnot, but we weren’t expecting half of that fund to disappear into HVAC since they were “new”, and/or replacing the back door and some windows. Yipes! Coincidentally, we’re on a no spend month for August! And September! And November, lol.

I hope your house isn’t eating up the cash nearly as quickly as ours. Have you been in a similar situation? Did it ever slow down?