Carpe Datum

Old Faithful

One problem with moving and fixing up the old house for sale is that I'm just not much of a handyman. It comes from long years of practice at avoiding manual labor whenever possible. Oh, I can do things around the house, and the more practice I get, the easier it becomes, but I don't practice very often.

I had to caulk up a big gap in the exterior brick off of our old garage today, so that means popping the cap off of a big tube of exterior "brick" caulk and loading up the caulk gun. Well, I had no problem loading the bath/tile caulk into the gun for fixing the upstairs window leak (and that hasn't leaked since, but M*chelle did the caulking). This one wasn't working, though. I turned the little endpiece until it felt flush with the bottom of the caulk tube then started squeezing, but nothing was coming out.

So I kept it up and kept it up and finally, when I had the butt of the gun on the floor so I could squeeze the handle with greater leverage ... POP! ... a caulk geyser. Fortunately, it all came off of my hands and clothes pretty easily, and I was able to proceed from there to fix up the hole rather messily. At least you can't see daylight through it anymore, just a big plop of dried caulking now. I came home and used the rest of the tube to caulk some gaps in the brick in the side of our new house along with our bedroom window.

I also need to finish replacing bulbs in the old house. Now *there's* something I'm good at, light bulb replacement! There are still at least 8-10 fluorescent bulbs at the old house that need to be replaced with incandescant bulbs. I'm not leaving my pricey energy-saver bulbs behind, that's for sure! By the time I'm done with the new place, I will have replaced roughly 50 regular bulbs with energy savers. It's a cost investment, sure, but I'm saving an average of 40 watts per bulb (most of them are 14 watts replacing 60, but not all), so that's a kilowatt-hour every 30 minutes. If the light bulbs in our house are on for an average of three hours per day, at about 15 cents a kilowatt-hour, then we're saving almost a dollar a day just with the bulbs. They'll pay for themselves in maybe six months (some have paid for themselves already because I've been using them at the old house for a couple of years, and these bulbs last 6-10 years).

The energy saver windows will likely do even better. I know a typical square meter of single-pane lets through (via conduction) about 100 times more heat/cold than a double-pane window, but that doesn't take into account the helpful effect of blinds or curtains and also assumes continuous airflow past the windows. Still, it's at least a factor of 10 or so, I imagine, and there are a TON of square meters of window glass on this house. With the tinting to cut down on radiant heating during the summer, we'll be able to save quite a bit. Big initial investment, though, and I hate going so deep into debt.

In the long run, it all pays for itself and then some, I guess. One we get these windows in and the rest of the bulbs and a new dishwasher to replace the crappy one the new house is currently cursed with, I'm going to pucker up tighter than ... well, you can make up your own joke. Let's hear it for 0% cards!
They've saved me thousands in interest over the past few years, for sure, and I have great credit so it is normally easy to transfer balances around to ensure I always have most or all of my debt at 0%. I'm starting to get charged a little bit for balance transfers, though, which is new this past year from all the credit card companies and SUCKS, but I still come out way ahead by avoiding interest.

Too bad our prospective homebuyers don't have such great credit. Apparently, this family with four kids really likes our house and wants to live in the neighborhood (our house is the only 4-bedroom for sale and cleaned up really nice), so they are the perfect buyers. But it's looking like they may not have the credit rating to make an offer. Very frustrating.

Posted by Observer at February 7, 2006 08:02 PM