Things I learned this year (while living in a house):

– If you don’t change the air filter in the heater every month like you’re told, like say, you don’t change the filter for ten months, you might just discover that the reason the heater stopped working was because the people who did put the filter in put it in backwards and the heater managed to suck the filter into a mound shape causing the heater to work too hard and overheat and shut itself off before it burst into flames. Also, you would have saved a lot of money on heating costs in the winter.

– If you buy one of those bleach gel pens finally and use it on the drain in the kitchen sink you might just discover that the metal in the drain is silver, and not that dirty bronze color you thought it was all year.

– Don’t buy nice ceramic toilet bowl brushes, you won’t want to keep them around all that long.

– If your hot water is too too hot you can actually go down to the hot water heater in the basement and turn the temperature down, that might save you some money too.

– The alarm system isn’t all that scary, but if you do accidentally trigger it yourself you really should phone the company to tell them nothing is actually wrong.

– Don’t keep previous occupants’ mail just sitting around without doing anything about it because it can quickly become a crime rather than just an annoyance.

– Be nice to the annoying neighbors because just maybe one of them will be awake when the house across the street goes up in huge flames and will shout for everyone to wake up probably saving a few lives, and if you had said all of those “Hey you kids get off my lawn” things you’d been thinking you’d really feel like an asshole now. Later you will resent the heroism because they Won’t Stop Playing Techno Music.

– The flue needs to be open.

– A dehumidifier for the basement is totally worth it.

– You don’t want a house where the neighbor’s deck is three feet from your kitchen window, washing dishes shouldn’t feel like a spectator event.

– If you are going to line the bottom of the oven with tin foil be sure not to block the holes that feed air to the flame. Otherwise, every time you turn on the oven the house will fill with gas, the oven will take forever to heat, and when the nice workman who takes a look at it doesn’t say anything directly about you being your own problem, you’ll still feel like an idiot.

– A good vacuum cleaner would absolutely make you happier.

– If you have two cars and two new registration stickers for which you paid dearly and you put the wrong sticker on the wrong car, they will send you a new one without charging you the $300 again because, apparently, you aren’t the first person to do this.