I have met a new level of cheapness I didn't know existed.

So Ariel and I have lived in our apartment now for just over a month. With temps averaging in the mid to high forties, we had a heating bill of $170. Our apartment has only once seen a 68 degree high inside. We turn the heat down at night and typically wake up to an apartment in the high 40's. Yes, you read correctly. The high 40's.

Picture this, if you will. The basement has six inch exterior walls of poured concrete with no foam or any type of insulation. When we moved in, not only was half the insulation missing between the unheated basement and our studio apartment above, the half that did have insulation almost to a rafter, saw the insulation hanging down from the rafters, attached only at one end. To make matters worse, the heating system we have is forced air, which is a problem when about 50% of the air is escaping right from the furnace into the basement due to cracks and poor sealing. What's more, the windows are straight up, circa 1950's and drafty enough that the wind flowing through them put out a lit candle.

So here I am, spending free time re-insulating (thank goodness the Landlord next door is remodeling her bathroom right now, and had extra insulation!) and re-hanging existing insulation. Then I patched up the holes in the furnace duct work. Lastly I covered the windows in plastic to cut down the drafts. Now the studio room only drops to the mid to high 50's at night.

So then we would go to bed at night, and while the main room stays okay, the kitchenette (across the bathroom) gets colder than the main room. So today, I go check it out. Sure enough, in the crawl space under our kitchen leading to under the landlord's house I could see the light of day. Literally. I crawled in on my belly like a war vet, only to find that there is a gaping hole that opens up to the outside under the porch of the Landlord's house. I'm talking big enough to almost stick my head through. So I stack up rocks and seal the gaps with the expanding, insulating foam in a can that I had bought. No more icy cold blasts of air chilling the basement. Hopefully that's it, I think to my self.

But then.... Oooooh but then....as I crawled out from under the crawl space, I realize that two of the six heating ducts that our furnace pushes hot air through, the precious heat we pay through the nose for.... two of the six heating ducts GO INTO OUR LANDLORD"S HOUSE!!!!! We have been paying for the heating of HER house!!!!????!!!!!

WHO DOES THAT???????

The worst bit of it all is that in the three conversations I've had with her, she's mentioned every time that she only rents to seminary students, and that she loves the church she's the secretary for. My heart's actually sad for her. If she was even living a comfortable life, I would feel compassion for her. But she's never been married, in her prime, and a Sr. VP at a major financial company. It's not that she's hard up on the cash flow. On my way out, my elbow may have accidentally bumped the dampers to those ducts. Oooops!