Your Heights Home

By HollyDurfee

Welcome once again to our monthly column on topics relevant to home ownership in our neighborhood. It is hoped that this column will generate topics from you; specific to home ownership and home investing. My name is Holly Durfee and I will attempt to answer your inquiries in a question and answer format.

           

Dear Holly – I am planning to stay in my home at least till my kids finish high school in 6 years.

Long enough to spend some money on my house and enjoy the improvements. I need appliances and interior and exterior paint. Where should I spend the money? Is there anything I can do now that will help me later? Judy G.

 

Dear Judy G. – Starting with your exterior paint, could you hold off a year or two? Maybe you could wash the house, gently so as to remove mold & mildew but not so hard that you remove the paint. I ask because exterior paint is an important part of curb appeal. If you paint now, it will fade in 4-5 years and be hard to touch up. I am guessing that you could probably touch up with the original paint for at least 3 years before the touch ups would stand out. Keep the color light and neutral, it will fade less & the touch ups will be less obvious. If the painter must spray instead of using a brush or roller, make it clear that you expect good coverage & that you want some of the leftover paint for touch up.

 

Paint all of your interior walls the same neutral color; it will make the house look larger. Hang bright and colorful picture or posters to get the effect of color.  If you must have more color, just paint one wall of a room so that it won’t be a major project to change it when you go to sell. Also, touching up will be easier when everything is the same color. Do the walls with a flat finish (it will not show irregularities in the wall) and use an eggshell/semi gloss finish on the woodwork. Absolutely no semi gloss walls or ceilings, ever. Eggshell might be okay on the kitchen & bath walls but anywhere else it will only cheapen the home.

 

Are you a good housekeeper?  If you are, buy better quality appliances that will hold up. Buy units with the latest features because those same features will be standard by the time you sell. If you aren’t the neatest and/or your teenagers do a lot of their own cooking, spend some time teaching them how to clean before you buy. They need to know not to use steel wool, greenies, comet cleanser, paint scrapers, screw drivers or any abrasives on ceramic top stoves or enamel coated appliance surfaces. If you have your doubts, buy used or inexpensive models for the duration and replace them when ready to sell.  Remember, new construction will always be the standard buyers will compare your home to.

 

Market Update – Because of so few sales in the neighborhood, inventory has accumulated,

climbing to a total of 59 houses for sale by real estate companies. When you ad ‘by owners’ to the mix, we are at a record high. I surely hope this is as bad as it gets. Buyers are staying put and not committing. Neither newspaper ads nor price reductions appear to move them to action. This is not the old market on tranquilizers; this is an unnatural cessation of sales. I am sorry to say that it is not enough for you to reduce the price of your home. It still takes a tremendous leap of faith for a buyer to commit when taxes, insurance & the weather appear out of control.  Our healing is simply going to be slow. The only good thing to come from this is that some of us may begin to take a longer term view of our neighborhood, our home. Since we don’t seem to be going anywhere soon, we might as well take pride in where we live and work to make it better!

 

Holly M. Durfee is a real estate salesperson at RE/MAX Jupiter-Tequesta. She is a director on the Board of Directors of the Jupiter-Tequesta-Hobe Sound Association of Realtors, Inc. and has earned her CRS (Council of Residential Specialists) and GRI (Graduate Realtor Institute) designations. She has been a resident of North Palm Beach Heights since 2001. You can contact her at: hollymdurfee@aol.com