As morbid as it seems, I have been thinking about plans for the family home when mother passes away.
- It’s an older house, but Dad took good care of it.
And now that he’s gone, we help mother with it. We visit her every two weeks or so and spend a whole Saturday checking her gutters, working in the yard, and changing her HVAC filter, things like that. The HVAC system will be one of the first things that gets updated. Mother has central heat and air conditioning, but her system is really old. The air ducts probably need to be sealed and cleaned, or at the very least, inspected. We will also need to replace the furnace to a more energy efficient one. But, now I am hearing about radiant heated floors and heated baseboards and heat pumps and so many other ways to heat and cool a home, that I will need to do some serious research before I make any final HVAC decisions. The house has a fireplace. I have memories about that fireplace, good and bad. Every year we would open Christmas presents before a fire in the fireplace. One year, I threw raw popcorn in the fireplace when a big fire was going. Boy, my parents were mad! They told me that it was disrespectful to the fire and we have to show respect to fire, even if it is in a fireplace. I look forward to moving back into my childhood home, but I hope Mom hangs around for a while. Maybe I can put her in a nursing home.