"Ooooh-oooh-oooooh I feel mah temperature risin'..."

Aw man, we figured it was coming. The first "big unexpected expense" is turning out to be the heating in the front unit. It kinda... doesn't work. And it's not just the thermostat, like we had hoped. So we had a guy over to look at it this morning, and I wasn't there for the technical talk, but the takeaway message appears to be, "it's old, it's busted, and even if we could get it to work, it's totally not up to code."

An aside: Now, we could play the "oh, why didn't we have someone check X more thoroughly" or "why didn't we think about Y" moan and groan game, but I feel like we covered most of our bases. The inspector certainly looked under the house around the heating area, but Nate remembers him making a point that heaters were not his thing, so he couldn't in good faith give us advice there. We did put a clause into our offer demanding that the seller fix the heater, but she refused. So it was either fix the heater later or have things get ugly, and we decided that it was something we'd be able to deal with.

So, where we stand at the moment is between any combination of three options:

1.) Say screw it for now and give tenants a bunch of space heaters: Euuugggghhh. That's the absolute last-ditch option. We really don't want to do that.

2.) Have them simply fix what's immediately wrong so that the heating works: This would solve our problem, but we'd still have a really outdated heater, and another fail would be inevitable eventually (of course, whether "eventually" means a few months or a few years makes a big difference to me, but I don't know that right now). This is pretty expensive... under 1000 but still pretty expensive. Also, they're not even sure yet if fixing it is possible, or if it's kaput beyond repair. However, if it's possible, it's much less expensive than...

3.) Putting in a new wall heater: This is the best option, and will probably have to happen in that "eventually" I mentioned up there. It's also by far the most expensive. Like, "yeah we totally can't afford that right now" expensive.

And here's the catch-22: once we get tenants into the front house, that'll be enough extra monthly income to pay for the new heater relatively quickly. However, in order to get tenants in there at a decent rent in the first place, we need heating. So now we have:

3.2) Do the #2 fix now, get tenants in there ASAP, and replace the heater when we've got enough saved up from the rental income. The major drawback here is that we end up paying for both the fix and the new heater, which is techincally wasting money. But the other option is,

3.x) Wait until we can afford the new heater, and delay putting tenants in for a month. Not a huge fan of this idea, since the amount we'd lose from not having tenants for a month is much greater than the amount we'd lose by doing the extra fix when we're going to replace the heater regardless.

So, a lot of this hinges on whether that #2 fix is possible or not. If it is, we'll probably go with that as a temporary fix. If it's not... well, I'm not sure.

It'll all work out one way or another though, and with the blog, if anyone else has dealt with stuff like this, or deals with it in the future, we've started some "collective wisdom" here at the very least.


AKC