Heating up and Cooling down

Next weekend we're about to have our house taken over by two men and a furnace. Since we've lived here (six years this April) we've done mostly cosmetic things to the house. We took out all the carpet downstairs and put in hardwood floors, we rebuilt the front porch/stoop, we stained the back deck, put in a new kitchen sink & garbage disposal, painted, and that's pretty much it. This furnace undertaking is the first mechanical thing we've had to repair (if you don't count the garbage disposal). 


Two summers ago when my dad was down we were talking to him about the air conditioner and how the pipe off the back deck had been draining and now it wasn't. Little did we know that if it's dripping it's a bad thing- the opposite of what we thought. The coil to the air conditioner has been slowly dying over the last few years. This last summer it had started leaking into the drip pan in the house and the pan has started to rust out. So if we did nothing about it, the pan would eventually give out and then the water would start dripping into the insulation and the walls below. That is not cool at all- one big hot mess! So after having our thermostat die this fall and having someone come figure it out for us, he had told us we better do something about the coil. Since we were done with the air conditioner for the season we decided we would take our time and having it repaired and do it in the early spring so that it was up and ready for next summer. 


Well once we started looking into the repair we realized that we should replace the furnace itself too. We live in a cape cod style home and our furnace and air conditioner is in the knee wall of our bedroom up stairs. In order to get to the air conditioning coil you need to remove the furnace anyway. The house is nearing thirteen years old and the life expectancy for a furnace is only about twelve years. We had quotes done and the three people who did quotes told us that it would be silly not to just replace the furnace since we paying for all the labor to take out the furnace already. In fact, they each did two quotes one without replacing the furnace and one with. Each quote was only different by the price of the furnace- which was only ~$500. When you're already paying thousands, it just seemed to make since. 


It will be weird having someone who isn't my dad or Matt's dad doing some of the work on our house. Even though they live far away they always seem to be able to help us out and keep the cost down. This is a project that they couldn't have done anyway- you need a licence to do all the refrigeration stuff. Plus, my dad will be down later this spring to help us replace our back door. Our next project...