20 Things I Do to the House Before the First Hard Freeze. The Year I Skipped Number 12 Cost Us $340.

The hose is still screwed to the spigot on the north side of your house. When the first hard freeze comes, the water in that brass fitting turns to ice and the spigot splits behind the wall. A plumber charges $185 to come look. The hardware sells a foam cover for $8. I've never bought either. I'm Ruth Sawyer. I've kept a logger's house on Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, since 1977, and I've kept every grocery receipt since then in a Maxwell House can on the kitchen table. There's a household ledger for every one of those years on the shelf behind me. If it came into this house, it got written down. These are the 20 things I do to this house before the first hard freeze. Most cost less than a dollar. For every one, I read you the receipt from Beard's Store in Marlinton, what it cost then and what the same thing costs now. And number 12 is the one I skipped in the fall of 1989. It cost us $340 and a bedroom ceiling. Harlan handles everything that burns. This is everything that doesn't. Tell me in the comments what your mother or grandmother did to the house before winter that nobody sells anymore, your county, and what she called it. The one with the most comments is the one I open the can for next. Next time: 15 things a logger's wife never threw away, every one back at the hardware for $9 and up. Ruth Sawyer is brought to life with the help of modern AI tools. The prices, the receipts and the methods are real and checked. This isn't a homemaking channel. It's a ledger somebody kept for 49 years. Write it down, friend. Paper remembers. #firstfrost #winterprep #frugalliving #oldways #homemaking #appalachia #westvirginia #savemoney