Anyone who has been broken into will tell you there is a sense of being violated. How a person can be so callous and brazen is beyond me. Yet it happens all the time. You are never going to stop a determined thief, but you can help them realize there may be better opportunities somewhere else.
In every home I show, list and sell, I see rotted wood. The most common areas to find it are exterior doors, windows and wood siding that is in contact with soil or concrete.
I really enjoy taking a nice warm shower. Even when my wife and I lived on a boat I would heat up water and take a 2-gallon shower. Some people enjoy cold showers, some people also enjoy jumping out of planes; I don’t do that either.
The bird is in the oven the house smells great and the guests are arriving, when your 5-year-old niece comes up from the basement family room and comments on the neat swimming pool in the basement. Furnaces fail when you need them the most.
When showing homes, I will often sit in the car in front of a home and educate buyers about what to look for. One thing in-particular is the chimney. It is the only thing on a roof people do not pay attention to. Many of the homes I show are near 100 years old and most chimneys have seen no maintenance that whole time. Homes built in the 1950’s and later are not much of a concern because they use metal flue pipes.
Thomas Crapper invented the first flushing toilet in the late 1800’s, right? Wrong, it was the invention of John Harington in 1596. Yet the Crapper name is best associated with a convenience that I personally do not want to live without.
There are not many moving parts in a working sewer system but when one fails it can be a stomach-turning disaster. My last article was about home inspections, this is the 2nd of 4 inspections I often recommend to buyers. A separate company, often a plumber, who cleans sewer-lines will do this inspection. When first licensed as a Realtor I learned my first and only Latin phrase: Caveat Emptor, translated means buyer beware. We legally could not point out flaws or issues in a home simply because as Realtors we ALWAYS represented the owner of the home. The theory being the owner pays our fee so we should represent them. It never made sense to me, I build the relationship with the buyer and never even met the owner until I had a written offer. Thankfully laws have changed and we can represent either a buyer or a seller.
As we walked through the house the owner described all the work he had done to the home. From sanding and refinishing the floors to spray texturing the walls. “Oh”, he said, “I found this used counter top in a dumpster it’s in okay shape and it looks kinda close to the rest of the countertop”. Thinking to myself I’m saying “Really, this looks okay to you”?
Filling a glass with water from my bathroom facet takes 60 seconds, what’s up with that? I know what the problem is, thankfully my problem in not that expensive to fix.
Most poor water pressure problems are very expensive to fix. The cause of poor water pressure is due to a buildup of mineral deposits in the water pipes, just like hardening of the arteries. There are several areas to be concerned about, from the water meter out to the street, from the water meter into the house, and finally the waterpipes going to the different fixtures Bathrooms are the 2nd most important room(s) in a home, what are the priorities to consider when re-doing or adding one? The design should be one that fits the time period of the home. Hiring a designer to help is well worth the money. I’ve seen many homes where the design is driven by what happens to be on sale at Menards that weekend. Yuk.
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