360renos: Bathrooms - Without the Eye Popping Price Tag

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

Subscribe in a reader

Friday, November 26, 2010

Bathrooms - Without the Eye Popping Price Tag

How to find the wow factor with out breaking the budget.

Updating the bathroom does not have to be an expensive under taking.

Some times a fresh coat of paint on the walls, baseboard and trim or just replacing light fixtures and towel racks will give the space a whole new look. Replacing the shower curtain can quickly change the look of the room, as can painting the cabinets in modern colors and replacing the pull knobs with decorative new handles. For a personal look add photos or art in simple frames. If the bathroom has a window replacing the shades are an economical way to enhance the bathroom. Look for honeycomb shades which reduce heat loss through your windows by up to 50%.

If you want to conserve water and reduce water heating costs you don't have to replace the bathtub or sink. Switch the shower head and faucets to ones with low flow aerators. Check out the impressive array of designer styles in the latest low-flow toilets. There was a time when this range of products was limited and not very appealing. Now they are both effective and attractive.

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

"Everything you can imagine is real" - Pablo Picasso

No comments:

Post a Comment

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