360renos: HST on Renovations starts May 1st

How to make your home stand out when selling

We can help your house sell quickly and at a good price -- even in a slow market.

It takes a lot more than sparkling windows, scented candles and chocolate-chip cookies to sell a home in today's market.

Improvements should be made so that the property shows well, is consistent with the neighborhood and does not involve capital investments.

Beyond any doubt, the best investment you can make is new paint. Painting can make a room or an exterior façade look brand-new, and totally transform the look and feel of a room or the entire residence. It is always wise to be somewhat restrained when choosing colors for a home-staging paint project. Avoid choosing colors that are too individual or flashy and favor neutral colors and schemes. This does not mean painting everything white, however.

Use subtle color schemes to accentuate the home's strengths and minimize weaknesses. Dark colors, for example, tend to make a room feel smaller, while lighter colors and pastels can make a room feel bigger.

There is another benefit to painting as well: the process of preparing the interior or exterior surfaces of a home for painting automatically allows us to go over the entire area receiving paint in great detail, and this can often expose items or areas requiring repair. It seems you always discover where the caulking has let go, where the wall is dinged.

It is always preferable that we discover and deal with these items before the real estate agent (or worse, the prospective buyer) points them out to you!

Dave - 360renos

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Saturday, January 9, 2010

HST on Renovations starts May 1st

Figuring homeowners will rush to get projects in under the deadline and avoid the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), the government has also added a May 1 deadline clause. Essentially, any project that involves permanently installed goods ordered by May 1, but not completed by July 1, is subject to the whole 13% tax.

But if the work is completed before July 1 it will be taxed at the current 5% GST.

The new HST tax will add 8% to a renovation bill. Currently, homeowners pay only 5% GST for services, which includes labour. But with the HST, labour will be subject to the new tax, bumping the overall invoice tax to 13%.

Imagine you order an Interior Painting project to be completed and the job costs out at $6,000. Pre-HST, your total would be $6,300 (cost plus GST). After the HST, though, your total is now $6,780 (13% HST)!

That new painting project will cost 8% more as of July 1, so if home owners have projects they want done, they'll be planning to have it done before the new tax takes effect.

If your planning on a project in the near future please contact me at 360renos

Don't delay if you are requiring a free quote for your next project or if you need more information about the services 360renos can offer you

For more information on the HST, visit Ontario Ministry of Revenue.
Article portions National Post

Dave - 360renos

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Which Paint Is It - Latex or Oil?

Determining, definitively, whether a given paint was oil or latex has always been a bit of a problem, but an important one as you can paint oil over latex, but not latex over oil unless you use a special 'super adherent primer' first.

I used to recommend taking a bit of paint thinner on a clean contrasting colour cloth and wiping hard. If any colour comes off, it is oil based paint. If nothing happens, it is latex. But that didn't always work. Sometimes if the paint was very old, nothing at all came off.

Now a product has come out that reverses those rules. These swabs have acetone in them and they have no affect on oil based paints, but do take off latex. If the surface is stripped, it is Latex paint. If it just cleans or polishes the surface, it is Oil/Alkyd paint. Instead of the special swabs you could just use acetone and a contrasting coloured rag, if the paint colour shows up on the rag, it is latex. Acetone will do nothing to oil based paints. Old fingernail polish removers were made with acetone, and many still are -- look for a bottle that does not say 'without acetone'. You should test it first on a surface that you know is latex paint to be sure you have acetone in your liquid.

By the way, if you really want to paint latex over oil -- you can do it if you sand off the gloss and apply a "super adherent latex primer" first. Then you can continue with ordinary latex paint!

Dave - www.360renos.ca