360renos: Wrong Wrong Wrong!

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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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Wrong Wrong Wrong!

I get a call from an Interior Designer I do many home projects with asking if I can have a look at a plumbing leak and ceiling replacement she is in need of for her rental property home. We head off to a beautiful 1895 home built in The Market area of Ottawa to do a little investigating of where the leak is coming from.

Upon opening up the ceiling we find a small leak coming from the 2nd floor corner shower drain and flange. Not a big leak but enough to damage the Kitchen ceiling below

So the 360renos team completes the repair on the leaking drain. Then we remove more of the damaged drywall ceiling so it can be replaced and we find big time problems from the previous home owner that did their own renovations years earlier. A lack of knowledge with building and electrical codes left the home with a major electrical hazard.

We find insulation wrapped around the toilet drain line. I guess they were trying to catch condensation drips from the drain line and soaking it up with the insulation before it dripped on the drywall ceiling.

The huge problem though was the old knob and tub wiring and 14/2 NMD wiring and junction box BURIED in the ceiling BEHIND drywall. Just wrong .... illegal .... and highly dangerous for possible fire hazard. The 14/2 wire is resting against the water copper pipe; a great hazard for electrical shock and you've got to love the way the knob & tube wiring wraps around the black ABS drain line. Oh man!

All junction boxes must be accessible and never can be buried behind drywall. So we called in our electrician and in no time he had a new power supply line run to the 2nd floor and the junction box and old knob & tube wiring removed.

The Interior Designer now has a much safer home for her tenant and a new kitchen ceiling.

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