JUST STOP READING RIGHT HERE...MORE ABOUT THE HOUSE!

I don’t have good news about the house. Gary brought our friend the oil burner guy over to assess. It turns out that there are two furnaces and more zones then they could count. The newer furnace is HHBB and they counted at least six zones, but I could only find one room in the house with HHBB. Where do the other 5 zones go? The super old furnace is steam, and in order to convert it to HHBB would cost “Gobs of money!” Donald is usually pretty good about giving me a price, but that was the best I could get out of him, “gobs of money” and “a fortune”. When asked about fuel consumption he suggested that we take the amount that we a spending to heat our little house, double it, then add to it again, and we would be in the range for heating this house. They also noticed that there doesn’t appear to be a lick of insulation in the entire house. They found at least two electrical entrances, one of which was fuses. And while the plumbing did look okay, the roof looks as though under the new shingles are rotted boards.

And yet I still want the house. Even Gary (aka Mr. Completely Sensible) wasn’t swayed. At what point is too much, just too much? Obviously I don’t know.

There was another house years ago that we almost bought. Similar in size, although it was well insulated and had a newer furnace. We passed it up and later found out that the new owners paid over $5000 for fuel their first winter. And I might add, this was several years ago, well before the current insane oil prices.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the barn is heated with propane, so that makes three separate units. Ugh. In order to make this work we would need to convert the entire house to HHBB or find an alternative and convert to that. Donald thought the conversion wasn’t impossible, but not easily doable either. I think maybe he just doesn’t want to do it because it will be such a huge job, which means we need to get Super Duper Expensive Co. out for an estimate. What is wrong with us?!?!

The other part of my dilemma is that I hoped to live in the house for a year before actually making any major changes. I would like to get the feel for the house and see how we use it before committing to something that won't work well, but with the heating situation we would need to take care of that right away, which would mean knowing the layout right away.

Perhaps I should be focusing my attention on the lottery to increase my odds of success in getting a bigger house.