Utilities can be exciting

I'm being a bit facetious, but Ken and I were pretty excited to arrive home from work yesterday to find our street is marked with various colors of spray paint, delineating where all the utilities are under the pavement. Why is this so exciting? Because it means that finally, after 2.5mos of waiting, our permit has gone through and the company will be coming in 10 working days or less to install a natural gas line from the main out in the street to our house.

This past March our oil heater went on the fritz and we decided this was the key time to investigate what it would take to switch our house over to natural gas. As it turned out, the process was not all the difficult. We filled out some paperwork for PECO, the utility co that supplied natural gas service out here in the 'burbs, and they told us what the charge would be for installing the line and how many appliances we'd have to switch to natural gas to get the best installation price. [I think it's horrible how they hold you over a barrel re: the number of appliances you need to switch over to avoid a higher installation price. They are, of course, forcing you to use more gas so they can make more money on a monthly basis in the long run.] In the final analysis, if we were to switch the heater, water heater, and dryer to natural gas, it would cost us only about $550 to have the line hooked up. Since Ken used to work for an HVAC supplier, we got the gas heater for the price a contractor buys it for before raising it astronomically to make a profit, and our neighbors' nephew works for a plumbing supply company so we got a tankless water heater for a steal. For the dryer, we figure we'll buy a gas dryer new and then will put our electric dryer on Craigslist to make a little bit back on it since it's only a few years old.

I'm psyched to the hilt about the tankless water heater. Our electric bill should go down once we no longer have to keep 50gal of water hot round the clock, even when we're all out of the house. And we should shake the problem we've had every winter so far where the first person to take a shower in the morning has enough hot water, but the second person starts to run out after a few minutes. Plus, the darn heater is about the size of an average microwave, and the technology is just totally cool. Ken, of course, knows how to install all these various things so that is a huge help in financial terms, though not so much in terms of time. Every one of our home projects ends up taking roughly twice as long as it should, but in the end it all works out. I always have to buy my tongue and focus on the positive, if long-in-coming, result.

So this winter we won't have to worry about oil deliveries, the scummy bottom of our oil tank that gums up the heater and causes it to shut off at the absolute worst times, and all the other fun things that we've enjoyed with oil heat for 6 years. And some day when our 3yo electric range goes belly up, I'll finally have a gas stove to cook with. Something I've always wanted but never had.

Of course, we'll still use our fireplace a lot this winter, and actually next weekend Ken is heading to a friend's inlaws' land to chop up a whole bunch of downed trees that they're letting us haul off for free. He estimates they'll come home with over a cord of wood. I think we usually use a half cord during the winter, if we do a fire maybe 3-4 nights a week, sometimes all day long on the weekends if we're just going to be home puttering around.

Part of me hates to think of impending winter, and the rest thinks it'll be nice to have a change of pace. We tend to get more done around the house since there's little to do outside and no yard work to speak of (yippee), and Lord knows our interior could use some cleaning up and decluttering. And we'll have plenty to keep us busy with planning out the building of our new kitchen that we hope to start next April/May. As much as I hate spending significant sums of money, I am going to love to have a kitchen that is laid out how I want it and has a dishwasher. Hallelujah!