HGTV HVAC

Half the fun of watching HGTV is criticizing the homeowners.

This couple on Property Brothers struck a nerve last week. Their home cost $650,000 and they had a $150,000 budget. The home inspection revealed that their heat/central air system needed replacement along with the ducts, to the tune of $15,000. Nobody wants to hear this but what annoyed me was their reaction. The homeowners stood there stricken and asked, “How will we pay for this?” They really had no idea.

How will you pay for this? Finance it like everybody else in America! Oh, sorry, HGTV can’t just write you a check for that and the federal government is all out of grant money to pay for inevitable home repairs.

“How will we pay for this.” Are you kidding me? You have an $800,000 budget; if you can afford that, I’m pretty sure you can take on some additional debt or move some money around to accommodate this. Shit, we were broke years ago and paid for a new HVAC system on our $150,000 home. Two years later, we had to buy a new roof. It was annoying but we did it. We opened a credit card with a low interest rate and then paid it off. This is how people pay for major or unexpected home repairs. Yeah, I know credit cards are evil and you should shred them and put the shreds in the freezer and shatter the ice into pieces and have a priest exorcise the pieces but we didn’t have five figures lying around. What were we supposed to do, sit around shivering and getting rained on until we saved up the cash?

“How will we pay for this.” Come down to Earth.

Then during the big reveal they noted the fancy improvements to the house and what they cost: $3,000 for a fireplace, $1,500 for heated floors in the bathroom, $4,000 for fancy hardwood floors, and $6,000 — six thousand GD dollars — for granite countertops. That’s $14,500. Can any math geniuses out there figure out which of these basic necessities they could have done without if they were really hard up for cash for that HVAC system? (Hint: The answer is all of them.)

These people seemed like the type who believed money was no object for fun things like a sliding barn door but couldn’t bring themselves to spend for an actual utilitarian purchase like heating and central air. Adults do what they have to.