The Workman Waltz begins again! Darn. I thought my dance card had been used up and tossed away. But nooo… Now we start another round, first with an air-conditioning contractor, then with a roofer, then with…???
Actually after the new air conditioner has been installed and the five-year-old roof has been stripped off and rebuilt, there won’t be enough to repair and coat the CoolDeck, even after the alleged $1,500 tax break on the high-efficiency AC unit.
It would be a break-even deal if the $1,500 materializes. Somehow, though, I doubt I’ll ever see a penny of that. It’s a “tax rebate.” How can you get a rebate on nothing? It’s highly unlikely I’ll owe any taxes this year. I’ve barely earned enough to get by, and thanks to the combined costs of Medicare Part B, Medigap, Medicare Part D, long-term care insurance, and one pair of glasses, my health care bills far exceed 7.5% of gross income. The EnergyStar folks observe,
These energy efficiency tax credits are technically “non-refundable,” which means you can’t get more money back in tax credits than you pay in federal income taxes (your tax liability). Check your last year’s tax return to get a sense of your tax liability (line 61 on the 2008 1040 form, called “total tax”). You can claim all of your tax credits as long as your tax liability, is greater than zero after all tax credits have been applied. . . . If you don’t pay any taxes, then you can’t get the credit.
Probably I should’ve opted for the cheaper, less efficient unit. However, I’m hoping that a better unit will allow me to cool the house into the comfortable range without raising the power bills a lot. One summer of sitting here sweating 24 hours a day was quite enough.
My beloved roofer came in with a bid about $2,000 more than he charged to reroof the house five years ago. I realize petroleum prices have risen, but that seems a bit much. So I’m getting another bid on that. If the other guy’s price is about the same, then the insurance payment of $11,300 will fall about $1,270 short of covering just those two repair costs—air conditioner and roofing. The CoolDeck, I guess, will just have to stay the way it is. Gives the place character!
Rustic, very rustic.
This morning I signed up with Angie’s List in order to get access to their recommended contractors. If you’re interested in this outfit, BTW, when you go to pay the forty bucks for a year’s membership, they ask if you have a coupon code. At that point google promo codes for Angie’s List and up will come a bunch of them. I got in for $31, which was still (IMHO) a bit much.
Can’t say I recommend Angie’s List. It was great that first year, when it was free (they give out freebie memberships in markets they’re trying to break into). But the full-fledged version is bloated and confusing to navigate. To my great annoyance, I found that top-rated businesses had some “D” and “F” ratings once you got into the details. Apparently if a business wangles an “honor” it goes right to the top of the list. In the searches I did, businesses further down the list sometimes had better overall ratings, occasionally with more respondents.
Eventually I came across a roofing company whose sign I recognized from the upscale section of the neighborhood. We’re overrun with fly-by-night outfits right now, come in from all over the country to participate in the insurance-funded feeding frenzy. At any given moment, about one in five roofs in the neighborhood is being torn up and rebuilt. This outfit is well reviewed—no one reported a bad experience, and one guy said he’d learned about the company from a building contractor with whom he’d done some business. So that sounded mildly positive. He’s coming over tomorrow.
Lordie! There are people out there reporting that they paid $10,000 and $12,000 for roofing jobs. What are they putting on those shacks?
“Ya-a-as, we decided to go with the sterling silver shingles instead of the solid copper. Copper is so 2009!”
Some Angie’s List respondents report paying comparable amounts to replace air-conditioning units—$8,000; $10,000…good grief! For residential construction!
Evidently that storm was sent by God Herself to lift Phoenix’s economy out of the doldrums.
Okay, okay, I’m glad (I guess) to get yet another new roof and a brand-new 14-seer air conditioning unit on the insurance company’s dime. Not thrilled: if I don’t own an interest in that company now, I certainly have in the recent past, and I regard it as my insurance company. Paying out for “catastrophic” hail storms cuts into the profits. But it’s good, in its way. The house needed a new heat pump, and I certainly didn’t have $5,200 laying around to pay for it. I’d planned to let it go the same way as the aging Dog Chariot: run it until it falls apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.
And you know when that would be: at 5:15 p.m. on the evening before the hottest July 4 in history, which will fall on a Friday.
{sigh} I love workmen, respect workmen, learn a lot from workmen. But oh! What a job it is to ride herd on them! It’s true, I’ve had a couple years of respite. But I hoped for about a 15-year break!
🙄
Image: Two Roofers at Work in New Orleans, Lousiana. Editor B. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
It seems to me this entire event has been pretty much a windfall – not the financial setback you seem to think. And if your total federal income tax liability is less than $1,500, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing either.
By the way, if you’re having a difficult time finding someone to make the repairs at the amount the insurance company is allowing, call them and tell them. If they can’t recommend someone reputable to do the work for what they’re giving you, they need to give you more. They aren’t allowed to just make up some amount and claim it represents the cost to repair or replace the damaged property unless there are actually bona fide contractors who will do the work for that amount.
@ Pat– Oh, no, I don’t at all feel like this is a financial setback! I feel very thankful to have this little windfall, if for no other reason than that the AC unit was going to have to be replaced within the next year or three. After having raised the deductible to two grand, I never expected the company to cover the entire cost of a major repair job.
The AC unit appears to be pretty decrepit–I think it’s at least 15 years old. And although there are reports of Goettl units lasting upwards of 18 or 20 years, with the parts no longer being manufactured it wouldn’t have taken much in the much of normal, to-be-expected repairs to knock it out of commission once and for all. So in a strange way, this is a lucky break.
The roof…I’m not so sure. It hasn’t leaked, even during another pretty heavy rainfall, and Frank, my no-BS roofer, suggested that I install the AC, which obviously needs to be replaced, and then invest the rest of the money in something reasonably safe until such time as the roof really does need to be replaced. He said that although the shingles indeed ARE damaged, all he saw up there was a lot of little dimples. The problem with the hang-onto-the-cash scheme, he remarked, is that if I don’t use the money now to replace the roof, the next time we get a tornado-strength monsoon and it lifts roofs off houses, the insurance company might not cover it. Frank also was concerned that when I go to sell the house, a home inspector might notice the damage and I’d have to replace the roof then.
Plus of course the cost of reroofing is never gunna go down…if the thing really does need to be replaced, it may be better to do it now than to wait. I dunno. The other roofer is supposed to surface in about an hour and a half…we’ll hear his story, which probably will sound much like Frank’s.
We had 4 big trees on our roof post Katrina. It cost $4000 to get them removed–post-Katrina prices. We waited a while to get our roof fixed. The prices came down a lot and we were able to do it w/in the amount the insurance company gave us.
Technically, the insurance company only has to pay replacement cost if the damaged property is replaced. Otherwise, they only have to pay the depreciated value. So not replacing the roof now could result in you getting what they call “actual cash value”, the replacement less depreciation, which could be as much as 25% for a 5 year old roof. Of course, with a lot of homes suffering damage, they probably won’t be sending adjusters out to make sure everyone who is getting money for a new roof is actually getting one. But they may just ask you to sign a statement that the roof has been replaced
@ Pat: Hm, that’s an interesting piece of information. Well, the truth is, I’m not inclined to dissemble to an insurance company…it’s sorta like trying to fool Mother Nature or the IRS! But if in fact they would pay something between, say, 10% and 25% and I hadn’t spent the other money, the total ought to cover the inflation in the roofing cost.
@ frugalscholar: I had the same thought! Give it a while until the demand drops back to recessionary levels, and maybe the prices will drop, too.
The second roofer was just here. He said hail damage pounds loose those little round pieces of…stuff on asphalt shingles. This accelerates its tendency to work loose and fall off. The roof will be OK for a while, but in about three or four years enough of that stuff will have dissipated that in the hot weather the roof will begin to deteriorate markedly.
Translation: if it ain’t leakin’, you’ve got about three years left on this roof.
Hm.
So I do think it might be wise to wait at least four or five months. After all the roofs are fixed and all the fly-by-night gypsies go back to Wyoming or wherever they came from, then I’ll get another bid. This one did say, though, that he would underbid most insurance companies’ estiimates. We’ll see…he’s supposed to e-mail his bid by this weekend.