Warranty Schmorranty

Why is it that nothing is ever free? You'd think if you have a warranty for something, they replace that item for free, and that's that.

Nope.

So, we have this homeowners warranty for the bungalow, which luckily we had added to the contract by the sellers. The company makes it sound wonderful... Buy this warranty, and if anything ever goes wrong, you simply pay the $60 service call fee, and they replace or fix the broken item. Sounds easy, right?

Buried in the small print, is a heck of a lot of small print. One item being, if something breaks, they'll replace it, but they won't take the broken item away. If we want them to, we have to pay. $50. Um, no. I have faith in the Chicago junk guys that someone will be our junk fairy this week, and haul it away. But that meant Mike had to carry it out to the alley. We'll see if someone takes it, or the city may be charging us a nice fee for the fact we just left it in the alley.

Another item in the small print... they'll replace a covered item, but if the water/gas/whatever line they are connecting to is not up to Chicago's code, they can not do the work until they bring those items up to code, for which we have to pay for. Yea, the gas and water line weren't up to code, shocking huh?

All in all, it wasn't too expensive. Less expensive than if we didn't have the warranty, but more than we wanted to pay. But, we do have hot water now.

One of the things we knew about the house when we bought it was the first thing we needed to do was replace the hot water heater. We applied to get the bungalow certified, which did happen, and one of the perks is we get access to grant money. So, we were planning to get a tankless hot water system. But, the city of Chicago struck again, and they ran out of grant money... hence, the old water heater exploded since we never replaced it.

I'll let Michael blog about the bungalow certification later. Fun stuff...