If you Build it...it will require Maintainance...Duh

It is June 2009 and the wife and I just celebrated our forty first year of Marriage and I am happy to say it is still possible to stay happily Married if both are willing to work at it and do what is loving, kind and needed to make a marriage work for a life time. Speaking of lifetimes...in our little home (the house we now live in) I have been giving quite a bit of thought to what it takes to maintain the old place...as if we had really tried to do so for the past few years. We actually had at one point considered tearing it down and starting over. Now we have been forced to live in it regardless of its condition, location next to the Rail Road tracks and overhead Trestle being our closest neighbor. Things this past year have been pretty bad financially and the silver lining in that cloud is that we qualified to receive some community action energy assistance help and that lead to this next phase of Money Pit investments in this house. Indeed if you build it, it will at some point require vast sums of money to maintain it to the standards of community energy efficiency, appointment for community betterment, and just being practical to live in safely. We are now getting it fully handicap accessible and assisted living qualified given that both my wife and now I am classified disabled. In anticipation of our likely being in need of a wheel chair or two, I redesigned the old handicap ramp into a ramp deck system that a person in a wheel chair could enjoy. Inside the home hallways are being redone to insure the doorways and bathrooms are fully wheel chair accessible and the fixtures able to be use while in a wheel chair. No Nursing home for us... no sir no way. We are going to live and die in this house if we have to. This past few months have seen a lot of changes in the old homestead; as windows are being upgraded, replaced, wrapped and walls, and ceiling are shoved full of blow in cellulose and the crawl space received blown on foam insulation and a vapor barrier laid down. Then the whole house natural gas heater has been up graded to 90 plus efficient and water heater replaced too... not to mention doors and jambs refitted with wind strips, and we are working on a new Central AC unit to match the efficiency of the heater. Phew! That is a lot going on in this old place right now and not to mention the wife is on the war path for doing much of it in our anniversary month. Then there are the surprises with tearing the old siding off and finding sills that need replacing and floors needing new joists and such...it just seems like we are living in that movie the "Money Pit" if you ever saw it. Good one I highly recommend it. This Repair and remodel business all started with getting the energy audit and then the replacement of the furnace.. and my agreeing to bring the rest of the house up to community standards...little did I understand the fullness of what it would cost or take to do that. After the replacement I was to have the windows, siding, and gutters done and we are now at window/door wrapping and hoping next week we will see the siding actually begin to appear on the house. Thank God for good people who have come to help and look after our interest in the Lord; as I am not able to any longer do this kind of thing for myself or my household. I am very thankful and the wife is starting to talks as if she is seeing light at the end of the tunnel and can live with the aggravation of what I have put her through to this point. Now if the local economy will just cooperate to help us pay for it all. Even with all the networking, advertising and great word of mouth for satisfied clients we are still continuing to see a severe downturn in over all sales and service that we are hoping for this in this time of year. We are doing all we know to do and the economy is still continuing to worsen around us. But at least we will have an energy efficient home to weather it out in.