Gloria's game shows come on at ten in the morning, and on my days off I can tell you who won by lunch without ever turning on our own TV. That's the first thing to know about our side of the duplex: the wall between unit A and unit B is one layer of drywall and a lot of good intentions.
Tyler and I have rented unit B since January 2022, a few months after we got married. The rent has been $725 a month the whole time. Friends in bigger towns sometimes ask what that buys you in Macon, a town of about 5,000 where US-36 crosses US-63 in northeast Missouri. So here's the honest list.
What we get
The duplex is a side-by-side built sometime in the 1980s on the southeast side of town. Our half is about 900 square feet: two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room that runs into the kitchen, and one hall closet that holds the vacuum, the Christmas tub and more shoes than it should.
The second bedroom is supposed to be an office. Right now it's a desk, a folding table where I pay the bills, and the air mattress we pull out when my friend Kayla drives up from Columbia.
Everything runs on electricity. Mr. Dale, our landlord, put in a heat pump in 2016, and the water heater and stove are electric too. There's no gas line and only one utility bill for power, which keeps things simple, but winter hurts. Our electric bill averages about $135 a month. It runs closer to $190 in the worst of summer and $210 to $250 when January gets serious. Water, sewer and trash come together on one city bill, about $68.
The kitchen has about four feet of counter, and a one-gallon pickle jar that used to belong to Tyler's grandma takes up one corner of it. Every loose coin and every $5 bill goes in there. It has sat in that same spot since the week we moved in.
We have a carport that fits one vehicle. My CR-V gets it, and Tyler's Silverado sits in the driveway and gets scraped on frosty mornings.
The backyard is small and closed in with a chain-link fence, and that fence is a big part of why we signed the lease. When we adopted Moose, our big red hound mix, later in 2022, Mr. Dale said yes to a dog for a $200 pet deposit and no monthly pet rent. Moose spends a good part of every day walking that fence line, and he has never once let the mail truck go by without telling it about itself.
Out front there's a small concrete stoop, just big enough for two lawn chairs, and a strip of grass Tyler mows for both sides of the building.
The trade-offs
Mr. Dale owns three duplexes in town and fixes everything himself. He's fair, he answers his phone, and he hasn't raised our rent once in three years. He is also not fast. When our bathroom faucet started dripping last fall, it took him about three weeks to get to it, and he fixed it with the cheapest part the hardware aisle had. It still works, so I can't complain much.
The thin walls go both ways. Gloria, a retired widow who lives in unit A with her cat, can hear Moose when he gets going, and she has never complained about it. We keep each other's spare keys, she brings our packages in when we're at work, and Tyler shovels both sides of the walk when it snows. A neighbor like that is worth hearing a few game shows.
The rest of the trade-offs are ordinary. One bathroom for two adults means a morning schedule, and I lose that negotiation more often than I win it. The windows are original to the building and let in a draft you can feel with the back of your hand. Storage is tight, and the kitchen has no pantry, so canned goods live on a shelf in the hall.
What $725 a month adds up to
Here's the number that got us serious about buying. By the end of this month we'll have paid 39 months of rent here. At $725 a month, that's $28,275. One year of rent is $8,700, and none of it comes back to us.
I don't regret a dollar of it. Broken down, we pay about 81 cents per square foot each month for a clean, safe place with a fenced yard, a few minutes from the pharmacy where I work. Kayla pays quite a bit more than we do for a one-bedroom apartment in Columbia with no yard at all. Low rent is the only reason we can put real money toward a house.
But living here has taught us exactly what we want next: a second bathroom, walls that don't share a TV schedule, a garage, and a yard big enough that Moose can run instead of pace. In January we decided to buy a house by the end of 2026, and the house fund started this year at $4,200. This blog is where I'll keep track of how it goes, one quarter at a time.
