We have a house fund for a reason. And we add a fairly considerable chunk of money to it each month so that we can afford home repairs, whether they are scheduled or emergencies. Intellectually, C and I both know this. In reality? We both hate spending that money.

The plan for this spring/summer is to replace all of the windows in the house. There aren’t many (9), but our living room window is of the overly large variety, so we know this is going to be expensive.

We also know we have some plumbing issues, but they’ve all be small, with work arounds that aren’t too bad. But as of last night, we have added one more plumbing issue- we have a leak from the overflow valve on our water heater. The water heater is only about 5 or 6 years old. The parts on it should not be going. This is almost certainly caused by excessive pressure on the valve. That could be caused by having the heat setting on the water heat set high, but in our case, it’s not, because we have to have it low for the adoption/foster care process.

What that means is that there is a problem with the regulator valve coming in from the city. And honestly, we had heard this before- about 5 or 6 years ago when we had to replace the old water heater.

For now, we can just put a bucket under the overflow release to catch the water, but that will make the third bucket we have. We also have one for a pipe that runs through the finished room in the basement that has a small crack (that we haven’t been able to fix with apoxy or plumber’s tape), and under the bathroom sink. The pipes there are so old and in bad shape that we can’t separate them from the pipes that run behind the wall.

I have been wanting to get a plumber out to look at two older issues for a while, but there always seems to be other things going on that cause us to put it off. Now with issue three, I think it’s time to stop putting off the plumbing issues.

But it may mean that we put off the window replacement until late summer/fall.

I just have to keep reminding myself- we have the money to pay for this.