Who thinks about a furnace in August?

We just bought a new furnace.

When we bought our house 22 years ago, the furnace was 8 years old. Now it's 30 years old. Every fall, we hold our breath and don't release it until we feel the blessed warm air coming through the vent.

Now with warnings of heating bills being twice as high as usual this winter, we decided not to take a chance on our old workhorse Rheem for another year. We're pretty conservative with the heat here, and our heating bills are consistently lower than most of our friends, but we certainly don't want to pay twice that much, and we don't want to wait for cold weather to do it.

Enter Sears. We fully intended to get several estimates, but ended up going with the Sears guy, who showed up first. We might have been able to get a better deal, but this guy was here for over 3 hours and wore us down. Plus the idea of going through that 2 more times was pretty off-putting. So, we're getting a Kenmore high-efficiency furnace, which he told us would pay for itself in about 3 years.

We'll keep you posted on that.