Ken's Questions Finally Answered

My friend Ken (yes you) & his wife just bought a home & he is full of questions about saving money, home projects that are "worth it", etc. I thought I would answer some of them here.

First some background. Randy & I bought our house in 1995. It was built in 1963 & is brick. The couple we bought it from are the original owners. It is a typical ranch (think shoebox), oil heat, decent sized yard with lots of trees. No carpet--thankfully. When we bought the house it was in pretty good shape for the most part. The owners were in their 60's when they built it & their 90's when they sold it to us, so no children had ever lived there & the house pretty much had original everything--even down to the swag lamps (anybody remember those) & floor-model record player. There had only been one coat of paint ever on the walls.

Randy is a true fix-it guy & has really transformed this place into something that is very comfortable for us & truly easy to maintain.

Ken wanted to know which project has been the "best" one for us. With an industrious husband, many have been "best" for us. The one set of projects that has saved us the most $$ has been making the house more energy efficient. We use 80% less oil than the previous owners & believe me, we stay warm. We have their old records & are able to compare them to our current ones.

A couple of cheap projects did the trick.

One thing that made a dramatic difference to our heating bill was adding insulation to the attic (about $300) & sealing up cracks around the doors, windows, & attic space. (about $45 for sealer). Additionally we added vertical blinds to every window & keep them closed when we weren't home (about $300). Voila! Instant savings on the heating bill.

A few years down the road we actually replaced the single pane windows with more energy efficient ones but truthfully I didn't notice much of a difference in our energy consumption.

When our hot water tank broke down a couple of months after moving in, we replaced it with a more efficient one at a cost of about $150. That helped our electric bill to the tune of about $10 a month. Last year I started hanging out most of our laundry & we saved a little over $500 in one year. Also, keeping our trees makes the house cooler. We had central heat & air installed (don't use the heat) & cooling the house definitely costs a lot, so being able to wait before using it has been very nice. We just turned it on for the first time a few days ago. Again simple things like keeping the blinds closed during the day have enabled us to keep cooling costs to a minimum. And we monitor everything--every bill, all our consumption records, all of it.

So Ken since you've asked (repeatedly) my advice to you is to make your first project winterizing your home. The money we've saved on our bills have already covered the cost of the central air & the new windows.