I need a sanity check because this house makes me cry too much 😭.
I closed on my home Feb 2025 in orange county, NY (about 1-1.5hr drive to midtown, NYC (without traffic)), after a year-long search. It was built in ~1970s, had about 4 previous owners, 2 sides of my house were added on over the years; one of which was a garage converted to living space).
I, and my family are from the city so this is our very first home. I purchased this home for $625k, a bit over 3,000sqft (not including the finished basement). I need to know if it's normal to do as much as I did ~1 year in, and pay how much I paid ($85k total). The big ticket items goes as follow:
250gal oil tank (oil furnace to heat 2/3 of home) - refilled 7x since moving in, total cost $4720
electric bill during this past brutal winter (Dec - Feb); 1/3 of my home is heated by heat pump $1970. The rest of the months I pay $25, because I have solar panels.
well water work - this item/project/nightmare was the start to my tears. my natural pH is 4.5 and very hard. To figure out how well water works and what should be normal, i spent a total of $3400. This includes (water tests, re-plumbing of water stuff (softener, neutralizer, carbon filter, etc), rebedding of neutralizer, water heater elements and anode rod for my 2 year old electric water heater (because my water is so corrosive it started to eat my heating elements, and at this point I am my own personal contractor because I refuse to pay the extortionists' prices)
partial new roof $16.5k (includes a skylight because I should at least bask in the sun as I cry on my couch)
new fence for the dogs $15k, this was tears of joy, because seeing my dogs happy make me happy.
moving costs + partial furnishings $17.5k (I'm not done furnishing, and this includes equipment, like snow blower, dehumidifier for crawl spaces, leaf blower, etc. I promise I'm not being reckless with my money buying $10k couches)
chimney work from a con artist. $4,295 (will need to spend $10k to fix what this criminal of a man did - got quotes from 2 places both said $10k).
other items in my tracker include mold remediation (in crawl space, nowhere else thank goodness), new well water pump (this made me cry), septic tank drain, orkin termite bates (scam), DIY installed gutter guards (proud of this), annual service HVAC servicing (why does it cost so much), other items that bring the total to $85k
Latest work is getting quoted $18.5k to add more insulation and air seal my home (through the NYSERDA Comfort Home program - highly recommend you look into it for your use case - it's a free energy audit). Just looking at the numbers, it will take my ~5.5 years to break even on this cost, assuming doing this work saves me 50% of my energy bills (which is optimistic).
I need to know, is this normal? Is paying these high prices normal for NY state, is having to do this much work (not including the optional stuff like fences and furnishings) normal? Again, I'm from NYC, so this is all brand new to me - and I just need to know if I'm in over my head, or I should get used to my new normal? New normal I imagine includes (replacing 80% of my windows, replacing my copper pipes eventually, because as I've said, my water's pH is closer to sulfuric acid than it is normal drinking water, replacing rest of roof, figuring out drainage around my home because when it rains, my basement somewhat floods in one area 🙃, on top of other regular maintenance).