360renos: April 2011

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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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Paint a Brick Fireplace

This is still a controversial decorating subject, but if you've got an ugly, dated brick fireplace, for goodness sake - paint it! I'm not talking about beautiful red brick, Georgian style fireplaces, I'm talking about dingy brown and grey, 1960s and 1970s units.

Honestly, giving it a couple of coats of paint will completely lighten and brighten your room, and possibly even increase your home's value.

This brick fireplace with log storage was painted last year for a customer and still looks great today.

Dave Bennett

Owner 360renos

phone 613.429.5000
mobile 613.282.2124

email dbennett@360renos.ca
www.360renos.ca

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Handy Weather & Renovation Tool

Handy Weather Tool from joneakes.com and his Home Improvements news letter.

As the weather flirts around below and above freezing, it can get quite difficult to know just what you can do and what restrictions the weather might put on your projects.

Now is the most critical time of the year to use the database that I developed last year together with CTV. If you go to the Weather page on CTV.CA, check out your local short and long term forcast, then scroll to the bottom, you will see this little box that allows you to choose your project, then your material and it will tell you immediately any critical weather restrictions for that specific material: must stay dry x hours -- no freezing weather for x hours -- minimum and maximum temperatures for application and curing -- and more.

Dave Bennett

Owner 360renos
phone 613.429.5000
mobile 613.282.2124
email dbennett@360renos.ca
www.360renos.ca

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