One of the things that kept me tossing and turning the night before I put a bid on my house was the furnace. It was original, it was huge, it was most likely not in working order. It would probably cost between $3000-5000 to replace.
Fun little aside: when you buy a house people will walk through your house, pointing out things that need fixing. Then they pick a number out of thin air and tell you that’s how much it will cost to fix. It doesn’t matter if they own a house or not, whether they have actually completed the project in question, they will have a figure for you. They’ll sound like they know what they’re talking about.
I always nod and then double the amount they say in my head. This has worked almost every time.
But back to the furnace. I knew it was going to be expensive, I just didn’t know exactly how expensive. I really grappled with whether to buy a house that needed a new furnace right out the gate. I called two sets of friends, both couples who had bought a house in the last five years and had done a lot of fixing and remodeling. They both assured me that this was not a deal breaker, that most houses in Portland would need a new furnace soon. They totally talked me off the cliff and I so appreciated it.
I brought in a few bids for the furnace. The first one was really expensive. The second one was from Jacobs and they created a bid for a high efficiency furnace, as well as a standard 80% efficiency one. With the current tax refunds, I could get $1500 back from the federal government, $350 from Oregon, and $100 from the Energy Trust if I bought the high efficiency furnace. Conveniently, the high efficiency furnace was about $1900 more than the 80% furnace, all of which I could recoup with the tax rebates. I decided to do six-months-same-as-cash financing so I could put the set-aside furnace money in savings to earn a little interest. This also gave me a cash reserve, should something catastrophic happen with the house. *knock on wood*
Once I had that figured out I scheduled to have the new one put in. I opted to remove the old furnace myself because this would save between $500 and $1000. By “remove it myself” I mean “call the guys.”
The guys, they are amazing, beautiful friends. But let’s look first at the old furnace. It was sort of beautiful in that I’m-from-1939 kind of way.
I made a huge breakfast, I bought a lot of beer, and I borrowed two sawzalls, an angle grinder, and a sledgehammer. I also bought safety goggles and work gloves. I made vague promises of destruction and demolition.
We estimated this thing weighed about 750 pounds. I started to sweat about how we were going to get this thing out of the basement.
Z ran 13 MILES before he came over to help and he still had strength to play air guitar. Badass.
