The Masters House

It has been two years since I wrote my post "The Low-Down on Water Seal for Your Fence" and since then I have become a little wiser. My first bit of wisdom comes in the saying "If a guy offers to stain your fence for about the same amount of money it was going to cost you in materials, let the guy make a buck". I was fortunate this time around that the guy who stained the deck of our new house offered to do our fence as side work for $300. Three 5 gallon buckets of Thompson Water Seal Stain would cost about the same so I took him up on his offer.

Granted, he only stained the fence while I would have stained and protected it with Thompson’s. It was worth it to me though because I got see how he did it and that will save me time and money down the road.

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Now that we are starting to wind down from moving ourselves and moving my brother-in-law into his house (yeah! I have my office back) we are beginning to look at the projects that we want to do around the house. We have talked about a lot of these projects here and there but now we are reaching the point that we have to define them a little more and prioritize them.

Here is a quick list of the projects that we are looking at in their respective categories in their preliminary order:

Outdoor Projects

• Retaining wall in the back yard
• Brink planters in the front flowerbeds and trees
• Side yard fences separating side yards from the back yard
• Trees in the backyard
• Outdoor staircase from the second story deck to the first floor
• Outdoor shed for the garden equipment

Indoor Projects

• Window Tint on the remain windows
• Paint the formal dining room, downstairs bathroom, and my office
• Install the new curved shower rod in the downstairs bathroom
• Install the plastic pads on dining room chairs and table

Garage Projects

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Everyone is going green these days. When I first moved into our new house the first thing I did was to replace all of the incandescent light bulbs in our house with fluorescent light bulbs. In my other house I was able to cut my electric bill in the summer by $100 (see my post Reducing Electricity Bill with LED Lights).

Anyway, our new house has a whole lot more windows especially in the front of the house. These windows get direct sunlight in the afternoon which is usually the hottest part of the day. Both of air conditioning units would pretty much be constantly on just to maintain the temperature in the house. My youngest son and daughter’s windows also faced the front of the house and their rooms would get pretty hot in the afternoon as well.

To date I have installed the tint on all of the front facing windows except the window in my office. Even as I was putting the tint up I could feel the temperate change even though the windows were not in the direct sunlight at the time. Due to the tint being metal based it actually reflects heat in general and not just heat that comes from direct sunlight.

The implications of this are far reaching since your windows are the cause of most of your heat and cooling that escape from your house. I am speculating that the tint will also to help keep heat in the house during the winter as well which will have additional energy savings.

My estimate is that my $150 investment in tinting my front windows could pay for itself within the next 3-4 months in reducing my electricity bill. My bill for the last month was $309 so we will see what happens as the temperature goes up over the next few months. If my bill doesn’t go up I will be happy but I am fully expecting it to go down. According to Gila (the brand of tint I bought) my estimates may be a little high but we will see. You can check out their savings page here - Gila Window Tint.

I’ll keep you posted with my savings.

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