Fun of home ownership

I am truly happy to be a home owner, even if I own a shared-wall townhome in a crappy area with 250+ units, who's HOA spends upwards of $110k every year on landscape and pool maintenance, while there are freakin weeds growing on the roofs due to poor drainage and tree debris decomposing and giving the weeds a healthy soil in which to sprout! - oh yea and about 20% of the attached shed roofs are leaking and have been for the last year and the management continues to put notices in the monthly newsletters that they are still accepting estimates to replace the roofs. Accept one and fix the shit already before the water damage of the sheds, rot out the wall of the kitchens they are attached to and puts people out of their homes. (ok, I got that out)

This past long weekend, we were chatting with our shared-wall neighbors about water damage from both of our various water leaking issues. We contacted each other this weekend because we both noticed some water in our shared-wall sheds, which house the water heaters. We had a little water on our side, so I thought it was our drippy main shut-off valve (which I've avoided replacing), and they thought it was the same since they knew I had been avoiding it. Once we each got all of our stuff out of our sheds, we found the real damage and cause. Their water heater is leaking. Joy that I don't have to take immediate action, but SUCKY, because both of our shed's drywall is wet and moldy. Unfortunately I cannot pin our drywall repairs on the neighbor, as we have both had our own water problems and there is evidence of previous owners having similar issues and them painting over the mold to hide it, so we knew we had to take care of our own mold issues. Freakin previous owners.

The boys (E & neighbor dude) started the task of removing the moldy drywall. What fun it is to be a boy. I went upstairs to the computer to start researching plumbers and prices of water heaters, because if we (I'll help eventually) are going to do all of this work making the drywall all pretty again, then I don't want to run the risk of our water heater deciding to fail a week later. It's 16 years old now, and way inefficient (doesn't help that it's outside!), so I have been thinking of replacing it soon anyway. I'll get that done along with fixing the leaky main shut-off and a hose bib against the house.

Neighbor dude got his water heater replaced yesterday, and sadly, the set-up we all have is not to code (they were sitting on the ground), so they had to pay to have a platform put in, and new vent ducting, and then of course the old connections no longer reached so all new copper was put in. I looked at the work he had done, and it don't look pretty. He wasn't expecting so much labor, so he was annoyed (home warranty only paid for the hot water heater). But now I know what to expect. Sigh.

Along with the plumbing repairs and new water heater project, the other 2 big ticket items that I want done before the true Northern California heat gets here, is a new air conditioner compressor unit (that boxy thing that goes outside), and new windows. No, I'm not loaded, nor did I recently win the lottery or rob a bank, but these are things that need to be done soon, so why not now. There is no way I will ever have enough cash on hand to take care of all that needs taking care of in that house, so I might as well support the creditors and live a little more comfortably.

The first window company comes out tonight to give us an estimate. Weeeee