I’ve mentioned before that we aren’t doing a nursery in the sense of a themed nursery that has become so popular among new parents. Our child will have a place to sleep (a laundry basket is okay, right? j/k), a place to store their stuff (clothes, toys, other boy stuff), brand new drywall and a fresh coat of neutral paint.
When I bought the house, the three things I hated most were the windows (old and uninsulated), the carpet upstairs (old and ugly), and the texture on the walls downstairs (really, texture on walls! Do you know how hard that is to paint?). After I bought the house and discovered that the downstairs bathroom didn’t have outlets, I added that to my list of hated items. All of these things are easily remedied, but all of these things take some cash and I don’t like to use credit unless I have to. All but a few windows have been replaced at this point. The carpet upstairs is coming up as we work on rooms up there (hard wood underneath), and our plan has been to replace the drywall one room at a time as we were working on those rooms. We haven’t had that opportunity yet, so needing a place to put the baby gave us the motivation to actually see what we were in for in the rest of the house.
Our fabulous friend is a carpenter type person and came over and looked at the room for us and told us it shouldn’t be a big deal. He helped Gene take out the molding and wood covering the ductwork (the ductwork for the rest of the house comes up through the floor in this room and runs to the rest of the house). Gene got the rest of the old drywall off later in the week and made a bit of a discovery. There was NO insulation in the walls…none, nothing, zero! I’m not talking about just the interior walls, the exterior walls as well. How ridiculous is that?! (This is one more thing I’m adding to my house hating list.) No wonder our heating bill is out of control in the winter. (We are talking $200-400 a month in the winter when everyone else we know pays around $100-$150). Luckily, I had budgeted to replace/add to the existing insulation in the nursery when we were planning this.
This biggest thought that keeps running through my head is, imagine the money that could have been saved by me and the previous owners if someone had just taken the time to put something in these stupid walls (yes, I’m frustrated by this). This is my fourth winter here (winter 2006-2007, 2007-2008, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010) and because I like a good bill history I can tell you that I have spent (and I’m including the projection for the rest of this winter) $5,000 on heating alone over four years! Friends with very similar sized houses and heating units have spent a ¼ to a 1/3 or that (and most of them keep their thermostats at 68-73 and we keep ours at 60-63, so this isn’t exactly a fair comparison). Now we know our issue, we can address it correctly. Our priority is the baby’s room, then the kitchen wall that is leaking (gutter/flashing problems), the living room, and our bedroom. We plan to tackle the kitchen this spring and maybe the living room this fall or next spring. I’m hoping by this winter we can have a much warmer house, but that will depend on how much all of these things will cost.
We should have the new drywall up in a few weeks. I’ll post before and after pictures then.
