Utilities and Firewood

Here’s another one Jim sued me for.  He wanted me to reimburse Pop’s estate for Pop’s utility bills:

• Electric       $15,092.61
• Heating oil  $21,926.89
• Firewood          $491.25

There are some interesting assumptions here.

I’m not sure why he thought I should pay for Pop’s electric bill, except maybe he figured that if Pop was blind then he’d just sit around in the dark all the time.  Pop wasn’t really blind, of course.  He had macular degeneration which kept him from driving, but he could still read and get by.  If anything he needed more lights than ever.

The heating oil almost makes sense, if you assume that Pop would have used the heat more with us there than he would have otherwise, except that he didn’t. Pop lived downstairs and we lived upstairs. When we were downstairs with Pop we were in rooms he would have been heating anyway, and he wasn’t turning the heat up for us; he  liked it hotter than we did. We did not turn on the heat upstairs; enough heat came up from downstairs that it was not necessary.

In fact, we lowered Pop’s heating oil bill considerably. We fixed a lot of windows and repaired his storm windows to cut down on drafts, which cut his heating oil bill in half. But the best part is the firewood.

Mom and Pop had a wood burning stove in the kitchen. In very cold weather they’d use it to keep the kitchen toasty warm while they set the thermostats way low in the rest of the house. They had an electric heater in the bathroom, and in really cold weather they would shuttle back and forth between those two enclaves of warmth. After Mom passed away and Pop had his heart trouble he was not able to keep it up, so we took over.

They say firewood warms you many times over. I thought about that a lot when I was splitting and stacking firewood. I had lots of time to do that. It takes awhile to split and stack a cord of wood, and we went through three or four cords each winter. A cord of wood looks like a lot of wood until you start using it.  When you’re counting on firewood for heat, you go through a lot of firewood. Keeping that wood stove fed was a lot of work.

But I did not mind. It was good exercise, and it was the only way Pop could afford to keep a room “old folks hot” in the coldest weather. Still, after Pop passed away one of the first things we did was replace that wood-hungry beast with a propane heater.  It costs a little more to run, but you don’t have to split and stack propane.

So get a load of this. For years Irene and I worked our tails off splitting, stacking, and hauling firewood in order to help Pop hold down his heating bills, and Jim didn’t think we did enough.  He wanted us to pay for the wood too.