<p>I should mention, in defense of my 1931 house, that it still has the original (slate) roof, and according to roofing contractors there is no need to replace it yet. </p>
<p>My kitchen was re-done in 1984, maineparent, by the previous owners. It’s very dated. And we have no mud room, no family room, no master bath, a 2’ x 4’ closet in the master bedroom, etc.</p>
<p>Without knowing the price range, it’s impossible to answer your question. Granite is great, but how it’d fabricated is everything. There is cheap looking thin fabrication and fabulous detailed fabrication. The former will be fine in a middle end home, the latter appropriate in a higher end home. People really notice appliances. A Sub Zero Refridgerator, high end gas stove top (Wolfe, Thermador, Dacor), good dishwasher (miele, biosch) speak volumns in many markets. A great front door, updated bathrooms and new light fixtures often return profits.</p>
<p>I had a memory cramp earlier–yes to Silestone in lieu of granite, as Chocoholic suggests, for the same reasons. Though some folks may not know from “Silestone” and prefer the word granite.</p>
<p>Another piece of advice: if you don’t do the roof and it does become a bone of contention during negotiations, negotiate a credit in lieu of doing the work…MUCH better than you doing the work and getting into a hassle about worksmanship, etc. afterwards. Same principle applies to virtually all “inspection” items, right down to the handyman level problems. You dont want to be still dealing with the Buyer and the house six months after escrow closes.</p>
<p>Check your local real estate practices: here, drapes and other window treatments are included in the sale unless specifically excluded in the listing information presented to the Buyers and then so noted in the contract; excluding window treatments is a moderate negative to many Buyers.</p>
<p>If you already have the ducting, etc., in then adding the AC compressor is a great idea…smart thinking to do that when you re-did the heating.</p>
<p>And amen to removing clutter…good thing our place isn’t on the market.</p>
<p>The excess clutter is a big one. Last weekend we rented a space for our litle pop-up camper trailer and got it out of the garage. The garage looks so much bigger now! We also rented a storage unit and have been moving some excess things (boxes of books, old toys, etc) into it. The last two houses we sold were on the market until we moved out. Almost immediately after they were cleared out, they sold, one for a higher amount than our agent told us we’d get.</p>
<p>LOL at the discussion about the drapes. We don’t have any (except in two rooms). In the great room (we call it the ballroom), the ceilings are 18 feet high and three walls have these gigantic windows 14 feet high. We never could figure out what to do with them, but since all you can see from them are trees, we just never did window treatments of any kind. I’ve also lived in fear for 14 years that a tree limb or something would break one of those windows. The builder told me once how much each piece of double-paned glass cost and I almost fainted.</p>
<p>Dig,
when you are done clearing out YOUR clutter, can you come and do my house? We have a 1 car garage that has only had a car in it 1X to see if it even fit…and it never made it in again…have to grin when I think of our cars outside, at nite, in the dead of winter, looking forlornly at the garage…thinking “if only they would let us come inside!” Much more important to keep the recycles and old newspapers and bicycles warm and snow free than the cars!! </p>
<p>The clutter is never ending…I have a theory that readers are the worst accumulators of clutter…we value words…so I keep magazines and articles and letters and on and on…I too will need a tomb when I die if I can’t purge or part with things beforehand…</p>
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<p>Then it sounds like we did the right thing in offering to pay xxx dollars toward a new AC when we listed our house a couple weeks ago. Our AC compressor died last August and we suffered through the end of summer/early fall without AC. Rather than fix it ourselves we just put a credit offer toward a new one, figuring the buyers could then pick out whichever AC they wanted. </p>
<p>BTW, we are looking at houses in the area where we’re moving to, and I’m leaning toward an older home. H wants new so he doesn’t have to replace roofs, plumbing, whatever. My beef is that most newer homes (in our price range!) have these dinky kitchens :mad: I love to cook and would gladly give up “bonus” rooms and sq footage there so I can have a kitchen which more than one person can be in at a time!</p>
<p>Maineparent - you could do what we unwittingly stumbled on - we’re building what looks like a Mayan temple in our basement - made of boxes of the detritus of our lives. I’d rather it didn’t follow us into the afterlife, but if that’s what happens, so be it. I long ago decided the only way it would really be nudged would be if a hurricane (it’s possible here on the eastern seaboard) ripped the top of the house off and flood waters lifted the boxes out of the basement. Or a raging fire. My worst fear is the local news station filming the aftermath, the local Geraldo stepping through the mess saying “they lived like this”. </p>
<p>My one justification for keeping those Legos (besides the money we poured into them) and wooden puzzles is that I plan to use them when I start my descent into senility. When the Legos become too hard, I’ll start on the wooden puzzles with knobbed pieces. When that’s beyond me, I’ll curl up with a stuffed animal. Coming full circle, through the basement.</p>
<p>LHofD: Lego?!?!. Growing up, all my son wanted for birthdays, holidays, whatever, were Legos! Then my wife got into getting Legos off the internet (older, rarer sets). When we built my son’s room, it consisted of a sleeping area, an attached office, a closet, and a large area just for Lego City! The city includes not only several skyscrapers, but abour five spaceports, two airports, a downtown, a Lego train running through it all and the Lego monorail connecting the larger buildings. Then one whole wall is set up with built-in shelves with some of the “collectable” sets. Arrrrrgh, we could’ve financed his education by selling those Legos on the internet.</p>
<p>First chore for S when he gets home from college for the summer: dismantle Lego City!</p>
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<p>Are you sure? Most home buyers looking for homes of your size have kids, don’t they? Your Lego City sounds charming! Maybe you could just de-clutter it, but leave some of the impressive structures. I know my kids would have remembered the “Lego house” and badgered mom and dad to go back for another look. ;)</p>
<p>I agree: the Lego city wouldn’t be viewed as “clutter” by most people.<br>
With us (readers) it’s the stacks of magazines, catalogs, print outs of this, that, and the other thing. Finding a piece of paper around here is easy. Finding a <em>specific</em> piece of paper is sometimes challenging.</p>
<p>TD: Remember The Mound Builders and the Pilers and the Platers?</p>
<p>On the granite, we just redid our kitchen out here in the bay area. we did madura gold granite with full back splash, wrapped around kitchen window with small window sill shelf. I checked many companies and got several bids first. Used one slab and the lower third of another. The company we used only charged for the granite used, not the per slab method. We paid $4,976.01. Since the cabinets were being replaced the plywood subsurface was done by the kitchen cab company, so that prep is not in the price. I don’t see why you couldn’t remove existing surface, but the new subsurface has to be very level. I wouldn’t do that part myself. I have tiled a back splash before, its not hard, just time consuming. I think the hard part would be getting a good tile match to the granite your happy with. Hence I did full granite back splash.
Some of the things I learned along the way: get photos of their previous work so you can check their edge work, not all bullnose is done well and can be so far off in measure form one end to the other of the counter it ruins the counters appearance. We did an undermount stainless sink and I caught two uneven spaces on the under rim of the granite where it meets the sink, not flush with the sink rim, they repaired them on the spot and now you can’t see any difference. We have one seam where the peninsula turns to the right. That seam is matched flawlessly and the installer did an excellent job filling and sealing that seam. They also made sure that when I went in to place the counter pattern on the slabs I had selected, that I got that corner matched up on the slab. So the pattern flows nicely across. I looked at pre cut granite counters that are coming into the bay area from China lately, their pricing was no less than having my own slabs cut and installed. In the end I chose a diamond certified, insured company near by with an excellent reputation. They weren’t the most expensive nor the cheapest. I could see samples of work done and had confidence they would not do poor work and run off.
We also did our own wood floor in the kitchen, solid white oak laced in to existing dining rm floor. There is newer Varithane on the market that is wonderful to work with, for future coats, we need to do a light sand and apply more. It dried faster, was easy to apply. Its water based as well. No smell either. Its a Blue can at Lowes or Home Depot.</p>
<p>Digi: how could I forget?</p>
<p>Re: the decluttering. Our house goes on the market this Tuesday, and we have an interesting situation regarding clutter. There’s literally no place for it to go because we are moving into a 34-foot RV permanently when we leave this house! To make the house presentable for the market, we have already gotten rid of piles of the stuff, including most of our music (we are singers), and most of our books (horrors!–but now others can read them), and so many things that we long thought had sentimental value but that we never looked at. Everything we’ll keep will fit into either our RV or the 5 by 10 space we’ll keep for storage (maybe, or maybe just for this year–we’ll see whether it’s worth it).</p>
<p>Freedom beckons, as does the ability to drop in on our loving son if he doesn’t call often enough! Even better, all this detailing of the house will no longer matter.</p>
<p>Has anyone tried or at least seen granite tile rather than a full slab? If this article is correct, it costs 1/3 the price of slab granite and the pictures make it look pretty nice. I’m not sure how easy it is for DIY (the mitre cutting might be a bit tricky), so perhaps if you have to add in labor into the equation the price difference narrows.
<a href=“http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=17870&pageIndex=1[/url]”>http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=17870&pageIndex=1</a></p>
<p>Nice mustache FundingFather ;)</p>
<p>May we all get offers above the asking price with no subsidies, in the first week on the market! May our appraisals come in at the sales price, may the home inspector give us the “All clear.” (New version of the Irish prayer “May the wind always be at you back…”)</p>
<p>I just spent five hours on the insides of my kitchen cabinets - ouch! (that’s my back talking). I’ve thrown away three large garbage bags, packed two boxes for donation and two for store-and-keep. I have about 320 hours more of this type of work, in addition to arranging for repairs, the painter, the floor refinisher, the carpeter, the landscaper. </p>
<p>Planning for April 15 Show Time and April 30 open house. I will live with the PODS outside for a few weeks, and luckily my son will return for two weeks to help me early April after his a cappella group’s West Coast tour. I told him “Better to work for me loading boxes and being a presence for the workmen than doing an office temp job.” </p>
<p>The good news (a little reward in advance) is that the top realtor I engaged seems to think I can get about $50K more for my home than I was thinking I could. Makes it worth the effort. The only thing I dread is that he wants almost all of the wallpaper to be stripped. (!) My house was a model home, lovely, but most people hate wallpaper now. </p>
<p>I’m going to downsize after I sell, I want the classic 3 bedroom 60s brick rambler in good condition on a 1/2 to -1 acre lot for the doggies. Then thinking about either buying a positive cash-flow townhouse rental property, or building a spec house again (depending on the market this year).</p>
<p>And just because I want to delay packing the next four boxes, I’m going to indulge my opinions about three fads: marble foyers, granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances. Marble is DANGEROUS - I know two people who have been sued when people slipped and fell in their foyers on a wet day. Granite is gorgeous, but you have to seal it - whereas Corian is no-care and bombproof (my counters looks new after 20 years). Stainless steel shows fingerprints like crazy - fine if you have a full-time housekeeper, otherwise it would drive me nuts. </p>
<p>Interesting that someone mentioned their house sold after they moved out. The realtor asked, assuming he found me a suitable property, if I would be willing to move out first - “sure,” I said. (But I think it was because he didn’t think I would REALLY clear out the clutter - he’s wrong about that - I am tackling it as a sacred task).</p>
<p>Fundingfather, that granite “tile” idea looks awesome. </p>
<p>Since we may end up getting a home that needs some kitchen updating, I’d love to hear if anyone has tried that or seen it in someone’s home and if they are happy with it.</p>
<p>Yulsie:</p>
<p>LOL. I’m putting of clearing out clutter. Maybe I won’t downsize after all.
Corian countertops melt if you put hot pans on them. I’ve got a couple of rings to show where the pots were. Otherwise, they’re pretty maintenance free, I agree.</p>
<p>Granite tile does look pretty good and it certainly has the same functionality as granite; the grout lines are very thin if you butt the tiles together. I have seen it in several homes. <em>But</em>, for a high end home at time of re-sale, it doesn’t have the clout of granite/Silestone/other natural stone. Corian comes just behind these in desirability. My Corian withstood hot pans, marite. It was white Corian, too. Can’t explain why we got different mileage on this one. 
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