A couple of months ago we got a letter from our insurance company stating that by April we need to replace our oil tank or we’ll lose our insurance coverage. Obviously we have oil heating, and I guess that as an oil tank ages there’s more chance that it will rust and begin to leak. So one a tank is of a certain age, 15 years I think, insurance companies want their clients to get new tanks.

So we are faced with a few major decisions. Should we replace the oil tank and continue to heat our home with Oil? As far as I can tell it seems to cost about the same as heating a home with gas. The other alternative is to remove the oil tank and switch over to gas heating. We already have gas coming into the house as we have a gas stove, but if we switch to gas we’ll need to replace the furnace and possibly have some duct work done.

Changing over to gas heating will be more costly, but if we get a high efficiency furnace I believe we’ll qualify for a rebate from the Government of Ontario. I believe the rebate might be as much as $3000 so that would cut our costs quite a bit. Still we’d have to come up with the money for the new furnace and any other work that we’d need done at that time first.

The other dilemma facing us is the fact that we’ve been using our unfinished basement as a large storage area! We have our old sectional couch down there, plus some furniture that we got from my parents home when my mother died. We also have boxes that we never unpacked when we moved from our apartment as I’ve been waiting to unpack them once our living room/ dining room and other home renovations are finished.

Whether we just replace the oil tank or change our heating system over to gas we’ll still have to clear out the basement so that the work can be done. I think over the next few months I’ll take a few hours each week and go over some of the stuff we have stored down there and slowly put some of it out in the garbage. I’m sure there’s lots of things in the basement that we’ll never use. However, what to do with the rest of the stuff is a problem.

We have a very small house and there really isn’t much room in the rest of the house to store some of the things we have in the basement. In fact, some of the furniture we have down there we planned to use in the basement once we renovated it. So I think I might have to look into a self storage service. We could rent storage space for a month or so and keep our items in storage while the work is done in our basement.

Hmmm maybe having an almost empty basement will spur us on to quickly renovate the basement. Now that’s an idea. Of course money will be a problem. We don’t even have enough money for Christmas this year let alone changing the oil tank or replacing the heating system!

So anyway … if this was your house what would you do? Would you just change the oil tank to satisfy the needs of the insurance company or would you take a leap and change over to gas heating?