Open House

Yesterday afternoon, my daughter and I went to an "open house". The realtor was showing a new home here in our subdivision. This was a home built by a different contractor than the one who built our home. Nice house on a corner lot, loads of potential. I see the "potential" in just about every home I walk into. I can look past the color of paint on the walls or the kind of carpet on the floors and envision other things-apparently that's a gift and not everyone is capable of looking past "things" when looking at a home. I can look at a poorly landscaped yard and envision rose gardens, wildflower gardens and patio furniture. For the most part I'm an optimist :-)

So as I'm going through this newly constructed house the realtor is telling me-oh this is an extra feature and that is an extra feature, this is only $500 extra and that is only $1,200 extra and to add knobs on the cabinets is only $350 extra. Holy Catfish!!! 99.9% of those "extra" fees are things that new home owners can do themselves and save themselves thousands of dollars off the price of the house. Adding things like phone jacks, cable jacks and extra outlets are things best left to the professionals everything else- DO IT YOURSELF!!!!

There was a fee of over $200 for a simple upgrade on the thermostat the contractor puts into all of the homes. I'm here to tell you it makes good sense to upgrade to a digitally programmable thermostat, that they can save you hundreds of dollars on heating and a/c costs in just the first year. I'm also here to tell you that you can replace that yourself and it'll cost you under $50 to do it! Our friends/neighbors in Virginia were taken in by having the contractor upgrade their thermostat, Jane had to take a half day off from work and paid $350 for the same thermostat we bought and put in ourselves and we paid $39.99 for ours. We immediately saw the savings, Jane and Tim saw savings a year later, they had to get past the $350 point - that they paid for someone else to spend less than 20 minutes total time spent in their house taking out the old thermostat and putting in a new one not to mention that the contractor didn't even give them a fresh battery for the thing! Needless to say our friends Tim and Jane were less than happy with that contractor

Even with the crown moulding on the cabinetry there was something lacking- knobs and drawer pulls. The cabinets were very blonde and to me it looked and felt like they were laminated, the only thing I could see that was maple about them were the doors. The white appliances although they were of good quality, they were giving the kitchen a dated look. Black or Stainless Steel appliances in my honest opinion would have given the kitchen a more modern updated look which is preferred by today's consumer. White is best left for other appliances such as freezers, dryers, and washing machines and even that is questionable.

Home Improvement stores have all kinds of workshops for Home Owners and most of them are FREE! I highly recommend checking them out before you have anything "extra" added by your contractor.