Dear God, Send Me An Air Conditioner

I live in an old neighborhood. My house in particular was built in 1922. While air conditioning was invented twenty years earlier, it wasn't exactly standard when my house was built.

In the decades since, there have been a number of improvements on the house. One of those was central air, thank God. Another improvement was finishing the attic and converting it into a gorgeous master suite.

But whoever converted the attic must have decided it would be too difficult to integrate it to the central heating system, and so they just decided to leave it as is.

Well—that's not entirely accurate. There is one vent in the attic that drops all the way down to the basement. When we moved in, the previous owners had wired a box fan onto the other end to push cool air from the basement two stories up to the attic. You don't have to be a physicist to understand how poorly that would work.

Oh—did I mention that it has southern-facing skylights?

In the six years that we've owned the house, every summer has been a struggle. We added dark curtains to block out a lot of the sunlight, but it still got fifteen degrees warmer than the rest of the house. We bought a portable air conditioner, but when it gets too hot, it trips the circuit. Which doesn't make for very effective cooling.

Currently, we have six fans running, but it only moves the hot air around. Some nights, it's too warm to sleep upstairs at all, so we sleep downstairs in the (much more uncomfortable) guest bed.

This year has already broken heat records, and it doesn't look like temperatures will get any more forgiving. We really don't want to permanently move into the guest room. After all, the master suite is almost half of the reason why we bought this house in the first place. We want to be able to enjoy it.

And, we plan on staying in this house for a long time. Something has to give.

So last week, we decided to make a long term solution. No more basement box fans, no more portable air conditioners that cause our lights to go out. A permanent, long-term, grown-up solution.

We called our bank to talk about a home equity loan. We compared a few different options with a mortgage calculator. We had a contractor come to our house to look at our master suite and offer up some solutions.

The winning solution, by the way, is looking like it might cost five thousand dollars.

That's more money than we've ever spent on anything—besides our car and the house. And I'll admit that we got sticker shock for a bit.

But after sweating my way through sleep last night, I'm not sure there could be a number too high for me to get air conditioning put in my bedroom. I'll make whatever sacrifice I need to. If I need to give up going out to eat for a year so that I can afford the payments on this air conditioner, it will be worth it.

I just need this room to be comfortable.

Now if only I could stop playing phone tag with this contractor...