On Friday and Saturday I spent two long days counting every item in a furniture plant for our year-end physical inventory. On Sunday morning I did the same thing for our house, with coffee, a lot less walking and a spreadsheet I'd been filling in all year.
Since we closed in April 2024, I've logged every house dollar in a Google Sheet we call the house sheet. Every receipt goes in, from the mortgage payment to the $9 hose hanger. Here's what 2025 looked like, from January 1st to December 31st.
The totals
- Mortgage payments: $23,085. Nine payments of $1,856 and then three of $2,127 after our escrow changed in October. Property taxes and homeowners insurance are paid out of escrow, so they live inside this number.
- Utilities: $4,112. Gas $1,136, electric $1,186, water and sewer $1,010, internet $780.
- Repairs: $2,629.
- Projects and upgrades: $6,686.
- Tools: $742.
Total: about $37,254 for the year, or a little over $3,100 a month.
Tessa looked at the bottom line for a while and said, "And it's not even a big house." No, it is not.
What's inside each bucket
I split repairs from projects on purpose. A repair is something that broke or was about to. A project is something we chose to do. Repairs come out of our house fund. Projects come out of the regular budget, with savings topping things up when needed.
Repairs ($2,629): the frost-free sillcock ($62), the running toilet ($19), the PEX run to the kitchen ($262), the plaster cracks ($38), the bath fan reroute ($64), the water heater ($1,780), the furnace tune-up ($119) and the garage door springs ($285). The water heater alone was about two-thirds of the year's repairs.
Projects and upgrades ($6,686): the attic and knee-wall insulation ($3,850 before any rebate), refinishing the upstairs floor ($410), Tessa's raised beds ($492), painting the garage ($298), downspouts and regrading ($146), the workbench ($186), the six wedding-prep projects ($640), the rim joists ($310), weatherstripping ($86), the thermostat ($119), window film ($42), Christmas lights ($79) and the $28 dump fee from pulling up the carpet.
Tools ($742): the used snowblower ($375), the circular saw ($139), the EGO leaf blower ($129), the Kreg pocket-hole jig ($40), the moisture meter ($30) and a handful of small things. The thermal camera I bought in October went back, so it isn't here.
Three numbers that surprised us
The escrow jump. In August a letter from our servicer told us our payment was going up $271 a month starting in October. Michigan property taxes uncap the year after a sale, and our 2025 taxes came to $4,380, a lot more than the seller's capped bill we'd been looking at when we bought. Escrow also came up $1,452 short, and we chose to spread that over twelve months. None of it was a surprise to anyone who understood Michigan property taxes. It was a surprise to us.
How big the insulation check was. $3,850 was by far the biggest single check we wrote for the house all year, outside the mortgage. We're still expecting a $750 rebate from Consumers Energy (we applied in late October and haven't seen it yet) and what I expect to be a $690 federal tax credit when we file. If both come through, our net cost is $2,410. I'll know more by spring, and I'll be asking a tax preparer to check my math.
Utilities at $4,112. That's about $343 a month. In the spreadsheet I built before we made an offer on the house, I'd guessed $275. I was off by almost $70 a month and didn't notice until I added it up. The biggest single months were last January's gas bill ($214) and July's electric bill ($146).
What I'm watching in 2026
Starting December 1st, our house fund went from $150 to $250 a month. After the water heater emptied it in November and the garage springs took another bite in December, that felt overdue. I'm also curious whether the insulation shows up on this winter's gas bills, though I'll wait for a full January before comparing anything, since one winter is never quite the same as the last.
The 2026 tab is open and still empty. If the rebate check shows up when they said it would, the first line on it will be money coming in, which would be a nice change.
