I suppose I’ve lived in the dark to some degree about the various details of being a real home owner.
The entire experience has been strictly out of reach for me, until recently.
I’ve transitioned from apartment living to residing in a real house, and it has been quite a learning experience, to say the least. For instance, I had no idea how much renters insurance cost, or how many pieces of equipment we would need to care for a lawn. I also had no idea that there were so many HVAC options on the market, or how much money they could save you in the long run. For the first time in my life I’m greatly concerned about energy efficiency and operating my heating and cooling system for as little money as possible, because having a large house really eats up energy and raises monthly bills sky high. It turns out that I’ve had the most basic and least efficient heating and cooling equipment on the market for my entire life so far. We’ve always employed conventional forced air furnaces to combat the cold, which I’ve now realized are extremely inefficient for heating an entire home. I’ve also had a fair share of air conditioning units that were dramatically out of date and sucked up power like there was no tomorrow while barely managing to cool the space they were supposedly servicing. Now that I’ve learned about all the pitfalls of poor HVAC machinery, I can’t turn a blind eye to my subpar heating and cooling systems any longer!