Home Inspection Nightmare: Wouldn't you rather know before you buy? Image from ashi.org
About three to four years ago, the housing market in my city was going all kinds of crazy. It was a seller’s market on Mark McGwire-grade steroids. Everyone was looking for real estate at that moment and a house with a little yard in downtown was mighty coveted. Back in 2007, friends of mine made offers on 23 places in 14 months and were heavily involved in five bidding wars before emerging victorious with an accepted offer and a place of their own. I get a headache just thinking about it.
In order to make their offers more enticing, many people during this time were doing all kinds of things to win – offering far above the asking price, providing massive deposits with offers, bumping possession dates to whatever the buyers were asking for and removing conditions.
Say that again? Removing conditions? Like what?
Oh, nothing. Just the very-important and you-are-insane-to-remove-conditions like the home inspection. While the idea of submitting dozens of rejected offers makes my head hurt, the idea of buying a house without a home inspection makes my stomach sick. [click to continue…]
1978 was a very good year. It marks the appearance of the first cell phone (which was probably the size of a football), a pound of bacon cost just $1.20, and the country was enamored with a dancing-singing John Travolta. Most importantly, yours truly made her glorious debut into the world that year. It was also a good time for home owners. It was in 1978 that the government took your safety more seriously and banned the use of lead-based paint.
But what if your home was built prior to 1978? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that 64 million dwellings in the United States currently contain lead-based products, so there’s a fair chance your pre-80s home is among them. As of this April, there are new regulations from the EPA concerning renovation, repair and painting work in your home – and you need to know about them. [click to continue…]
Are you as tired of the Olympic spirit as we are? It’s not that we’re total sport Scrooges, it’s just that it’s easy to get a little cynical after a while. These athletes train, train, train, train and train and it seems like only the gold medalists get any glory. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, “Gold medalist: Greatest guy in the world. Silver and bronze medalists: Never heard of them.”
Well, for those medalists who didn’t take quite enough steroids to capture first place (and in case you didn’t know, curlers are the ultimate juiceheads), we have a way they can turn those bronze medals into gold-looking ones: Metal Magic Metal Refinishing. [click to continue…]
