In a recent edition of The Wall Street Journal Sunday, columnist Jonathan Clements wrote an article entitled, How to Throw Away a Lot of Money. He listed seven ways we unwittingly waste money. I read through the first six, agreeing with him on each item. But I was distressed to see his item #7, “Remodel your Home.” I think he has missed the most important reason for remodeling.

Mr. Clements chose to look at home remodeling as a simple financial exercise. He cited an article from Remodeling magazine where they said that a major kitchen remodeling might cost $54,909, yet only increase the house’s resale value by $40,732. They went on to say that other home improvement projects were also money losers.

Now my first reaction when reading this was that there was no explanation given in the survey about what type of neighborhoods these remodeled houses were in. Remember, the three rules of real estate are location, location, and location. Certainly some remodeling projects in neighborhoods of small, modestly appointed houses will bring the investment in a house above what the neighborhood can handle. It’s never good to be the largest and most expensive house on the block. The surrounding houses will put a “ceiling” on your resale value. That is an important consideration and I can accept the fact that it is hard to get your remodeling dollars back in this situation.

But what if you are the smallest house in the neighborhood? What if your house is outdated? What is many of the neighboring houses are being remodeled? An existing, outdated kitchen would dramatically reduce your resale value, as well as make your house harder to sell. In these cases, I would predict that you would get every dollar back if you sold your house soon after remodeling it.

And there’s the rub. Most remodeling is done to make a house more livable for the current residents. They are not done to “flip” the house and make a quick buck. That’s why it is extremely important to consider the emotional and personal comfort value a remodeling will bring and not just the added property value. How much is your happiness worth? That new kitchen or expanded family room can make a gigantic difference in your family’s life. Consider also that remodeling can give you the house you have always wanted in the neighborhood where you are already happy living. There is a good chance your current house is more conveniently located than a new house you might buy. And moving is disruptive. Staying in your current house could mean your children don’t have to change schools, your commuting time is shorter, you burn less gasoline, and you stay near your friends.

Eventually, Jonathan Clements does acknowledge this at the end of his column. He says, “I have nothing against home improvements. But you should undertake them because they will give you a lot of pleasure – and not because you think they’re a good investment.”

I agree with him. But I would add that remodeling your house can be a investment that brings a huge positive return to you and your family’s happiness. Maybe you can buy happiness, after all.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Remodeling Pays You Back Financially and Emotionally appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

Just How Big Is a 2×4?

Apparently a California Superior Court judge did not know the answer to this basic construction question. And you may not know. That’s okay. However, anyone who has even the slightest contact with construction knows that a 2×4 is actually 1 ½ inches by 3 ½ inches. When Judge Paul M. Haakenson found this out, he didn’t like it. In fact, he didn’t like it so much he ordered Lowe’s home improvement stores to pay $1.6 million as part of a civil consumer protection action settlement because Lowe’s had, in his words, “unlawfully advertised structural dimensional building products for sale.”

Never mind that every Building Code in the country shows 2×4’s to be 1 ½”x 3 ½” and tabulates their structural capacity based on the actual size and not the nominal size. This judge took a stand to protect the public even if he had no idea what he was talking about.

But the judge had accomplices in this judicial travesty. The suit was brought by a representative from a local weights and measures division after they visited one of the company’s stores and “expressed concerns” about product measurements. Apparently, Marin County District Attorney Edward S. Berberian, who sounds like he doesn’t know which end of a hammer to hold, agreed with the weights and measures guy and he brought the suit against Lowe’s. As he rode his white horse to the rescue of the exploited public, Berberian said, “Consumers should expect when making product purchases that retailers are providing accurate information, especially when misinformation could adversely affect building projects that more often than not rely on precise measurements.”

I would suggest to everyone reading this article that if you do not know the actual size of a 2×4, you should not be doing any construction work. Hire a builder. And if your builder does not know the actual size of a 2×4, fire him and find a new builder.

Wait until these guys find out that a 2×6 is actually 1 ½”x 5 ½”, and a 2×8 is actually 1 ½”x 7 ¼”, and a 2×10 is actually 1 ½”x 9 ¼”. Will the insanity ever stop?

No. It doesn’t stop there. Did you know that a ten penny nail doesn’t cost ten cents? Yikes!! Better alert Marin County ASAP.

  I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post News Flash! A 2×4 Is Not 2 inches by 4 inches! appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

A reader sent me a question about laying flooring in a house she described as being an “antique” home with low ceiling and dark beams. The home was originally built in 1720 with some of the foundations dating from 1680. That certainly counts as “old.” They had already replaced old, rotted beams and installed new joists. The concern was which direction to lay the flooring. They were using random width white oak. She lamented to me, “In trying to achieve a simple, serene and harmonious framework, I have been frustrated that I could not make our old house pull off every new trick. But it’s a privilege to have the opportunity to put our stamp on a piece of history.” I applaud her attitude and her desire to do a good deed for an old building.

I answered her saying she should look to her old house for the solutions. It would “tell” her the answer. Here’s how. In old houses, the floor boards would have been installed directly on the structural beams of the floors. There would have been no subflooring of any kind. No plywood, OSB board, or even diagonal subflooring. Without subflooring, the planks of the wood floor can only be installed perpendicular (at 90 degree angles) to the beams, simply to hold them up. There would have been no other choice. Additionally, the beams on one floor would have run in the same direction on both floors. For efficient use of precious lumber, and for greater strength, the beams would almost always go the shorter direction across the room, thus causing the floor boards to run the long direction in the rooms.

Here is another tip that might help with flooring direction. I often install a flush threshold of flooring in doorways. These would be made of planks with a width that matches the wall thickness. These flush thresholds provide the opportunity to change flooring direction comfortably if needed. In newer houses I often use a different species of wood for these so as to make them stand out a bit. But in an old “antique” house, you might want to use the same species of wood, but a solid board that is extra wide so it matches the wall thickness. It will make a subtle, but elegant transition.

I think the best advice for working with a very old house is to find the solution that is the most practical. That is the way the original builders of the house would have approached everything. What we see as decorative now was often the most practical way of building at the time.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

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I recently received a question about how to decide the correct height for an interior door.  The home has 9′ ceilings in most rooms, but the corridor connecting them are 8′.  They were advised by the door supply company to consider a 7’2′ door to make the rooms appear higher.

My response:  In rooms/or corridors with an 8′ ceiling a standard height door of 6’8″ is best.  that is the standard in the United States.  In other parts of the world that standard may be different.  These standard height doors also work well in rooms with 9′ ceilings.

When you are deciding on a door height you need to consider the size of the trim on the door and any crown moulding that will be on the top of the wall.  You don’t want the area above the door to look crowded or to have the trim and crown moulding crash into each other.

Keep in mind that any door that is a different height than 6’8″ may cost quite a bit more since it is not “standard”.  So, I like to stay with the standard height unless the rooms are 10′ or higher.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

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You might get a builder or even a floor finisher telling you that oil and water don’t mix and this won’t work. But they would be wrong. The water and oil are only the “carrying” agents of the finish and do not remain present in the finish. You are never actually mixing oil and water. This finishing method works great. The wood floors in my own house are finished this way.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Don’t Let Your Hardwood Floors Turn Yellow appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

Some house designs start out in the right direction but manage to veer off the road and end up in a ditch. I noticed a house that once appeared on the HGTV Facebook page recently. The architect (or house designer) who designed this house must have been texting while driving. They started out with a solid concept of designing a farmhouse with a wraparound porch. There are not many architectural styles that are as universally appealing and express “home” as well as a farmhouse. It just makes you think of Ma, apple pie, and sipping an ice cold lemonade while sitting in a rocker on the porch, even if not a single day of your childhood was spent on a farm.

A good house design needs to stay true to its style. And in this example, the architect tried adding in elements that are out of tune with the melody. The initial impression of this house is not at all good. Why is that? The primary villain is the second floor front porch roof. It lacks the detail that a traditional element in this style should have. It is just plain clumsy. It is so clunky, you can’t keep your eye from landing on it first, drawing attention away from the main front door and the nice wraparound porch. Additionally, the form of this roof porch is strange. A gable on top of a shed dormer kind of roof shape is just plain weird. It all looks like something that belongs elsewhere, not in a farmhouse style house design.

The side gables on the main roof look great. They are “in tune” with the style. It seems to me that using a gable that matches the primary gables of the main house, with matching overhang, slope, and detail and having it intersect the main roof simply, without the shed dormer kind of thing, would have provided consistency and “held” the house design together. The roof would have been elegant in its simplicity, just as a farmhouse should be.

That was not enough style mixing for this architect. He or she decided to throw in a contemporary cable railing. Cable railings are great because they block the view less than wooden railings. I like them so much, I have one around my covered porch. However, my house is more contemporary and is on a lake where the nautical reference of the cable rail is appropriate. I think a white, wooden railing would have been the better and more stylistically consistent choice for this house. And a wooden railing with boxed newels at the corners for the columns to sit upon would have been the right thing for the second floor porch. The railing would have “engaged” the porch railing with the roof, giving cohesiveness to this house design.

This is a Gable-Front and Wing Home featuring wrap porch. The style does not typically contain a front balcony that interrupts the porch roof. But one could be added if it remained consistent with the materials and details used in the rest of the house.

The lesson here is that simpler, straight-forward designs are always best. You do not want to jam every idea, good or bad, into one house design. Understand what the house “wants” to be, include elements that support that, and omit any elements that do not. And if you’re looking for a good reference source for house design styles, take a look at A Field Guide To American Houses, by Virginia Savage and Lee McAlester.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Your House Design Style Needs to Be Consistent appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

It costs money to move. You have the cost of the movers, the real estate commissions to sell you present house, and the costs of fixing up your house to get it in shape to sell. If you choose instead to take on a home remodeling project, you can save those costs and that money can go directly into tangible improvements in your current house. The cost of the realtor’s commission alone can buy you a brand new kitchen.

Right now, with the values of homes down from what they had been in the recent past, you probably can’t sell your house for what you might have hoped for. A home remodeling can save you the trouble and anxiety of selling your house in a down market. You have not lost any value until you actually sell your house. So another financial benefit of remodeling your current house to be the house you want it to be is that you can wait out the market and let the property values     return over the next few years.

A home remodeling can add useful living space, Attic Remodeling and Basement Remodeling can ad lots of useful square footage at a fraction of the cost of building a new addition. And if you have a wet basement and fear that any basement finishing project will be doomed to mold and water damage, think again. There are effective ways to Fix a Wet Basement and keep it as dry as the rest of your house. There is a cost do correcting the wet basement problem, but it will be worth it if it adds nice, dry useful space to your house.

Beyond the financial benefits of a home remodeling, you can have the benefit of staying in your present location. Moving to a new location can be disruptive. If you like where you live, if you like your community, neighbors, church, clubs, and other conveniences, if you don’t want to find new doctors, dentists, hair stylists, and restaurants, staying in your present community can be a very valuable benefit. And you won’t have to change your address or learn new phone numbers, either.

Make no mistake, home remodeling comes with its own disruptions. The logistics of living in the house while the work is being done can be challenging. Sometimes it makes sense to move out temporarily and let the dust fly while you’re gone. Home Remodeling Costs can be hard to predict and unforeseen expenses can creep up as you begin Removing Walls or start discovering things that need replacement or repair that were hidden at the outset. But much of this cost can be controlled and anticipated. The more you plan out what you want and how to do it, the fewer things will rise up and bite your checkbook.

All good planning begins with a goal. You need to establish what you are trying to achieve and then figure out how to reach that goal. Home remodeling that is simply a collection of individual tasks may be fine, but if your goal is to make your house into something better, if you want things updated for style or convenience, if you want to make your house more energy efficient, or if you want to transform your house into a house you can retire and live in for the rest of your life, you should use solid planning to prioritize the tasks and make sure you get the best benefit from your trouble and expense.

Typical remodeling projects often include Kitchen Remodeling or Bathroom Remodeling. Many houses are in great locations, but time seems to have passed them by. The most often used rooms in your house, and the most expensive rooms in your house, are the kitchen and bathrooms. These are the rooms that “define” the quality level of the house in most buyers’ minds. Are the appliances up to date? Are the cabinets of good quality and conveniently arranged? Is the style of the rooms on a par with new homes and the convenience and look you would expect in a new home? A kitchen that looks like the one in the Brady Bunch house looks old and tired. Tastes change and trends come and go. A retro look bathroom can be charming, when properly done. But if that retro look comes with cracked tile and cramped spaces, the charm is lost and we feel only the inconvenience of the old finishes and fixtures.

Other remodeling projects might be done to improve the energy efficiency of a home. Replacement Windows, additional House Insulation, and even the addition of a Sunroom could be measures taken to reduce energy consumption and lower the operating cost of a house. If you are doing any kind of remodeling, at all, give some consideration to tightening up your house and improving its insulation and mechanical systems while you are doing the other work. The fact that some of the walls and floors in your house will be open and accessible while the construction is taking place means that adding insulation or replacing leaky windows might actually cost a bit less than it might cost otherwise.

Don’t forget the exterior of your house. Does your house need a facelift? Does it look dated and a bit old? A clever and creative exterior redesign can make an old house look new and add real value to your property. It’s sometimes hard to imagine what your house might look like with a new look. But someone like my friend, Evan Visser can help you out. He is an architectural illustrator and designer. He can take a picture of your existing house and produce a color illustration of how it could be transformed.

Please read some of our Bathroom Remodeling Tips, Kitchen Remodeling Tips, and Home Remodeling Tips for lists of things to consider and things to watch out for to make your Home Remodeling a success.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Home Remodeling Turn Your Old Home into Your Dream Home appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

Window grids, more properly called muntins, are the slender bars that divide a large window into smaller panes, or lites. In the UK these grids are called glazing bars and they’re called astragals in Scotland. The small strips of metal that join glass in leaded glass windows are known as the caming. By whatever name you choose, do more than divide panes of glass. They are a critical architectural feature that has a significant influence on the style of a house.

Muntins and small panes of glass have a historical origin. Long ago, sheets of glass could only be made in small pieces, much smaller than a useful house window needed to be. In order to get windows of a useful size, multiple panes of glass were joined together. A colonial American double hung window might easily have had six, nine, twelve, or more panes in each sash.

As glass manufacturing improved, larger panes were possible, but much more costly. This is around the time when house windows with multiple panes in the top sash, but one large pane in the lower sash began to appear. This style of window provided a clear, unobstructed view in the more costly pane that was at eye level where people looked through, while preserving some economy in the upper sash by using the smaller pieces of glass joined by muntins.

Eventually, large glass became more economical and small panes were no longer necessary. Today, windows are divided into small panes purely for appearance and style purposes.

In low-cost windows, the multiple pane look is achieved by installing muntins or grid frames that snap into the sash and overlay the glass. These tend to not be durable and are easily broken. Snap in grids are also not very authentic looking. But, this kind of window grid does have the advantage of being removable to make window cleaning easier.

Some house windows are available with grids that are permanently located between the panes of glass. This costs more than the snap in grid. These look a bit better. But the primary advantage of these embedded grids is that they are durable. They cannot be removed or broken and cleaning the window is still easy because you don’t have the muntins interfering with the cleaning process.

In high-end windows, simulated divided lites, known as SDLs are very popular. SDL windows have a single sheet of insulating glass in each sash. A framework of window grids are permanently glued to both the inside and the outside of the glass. The inside grids are made of wood to match the interior material of the window unit. The exterior grids match the exterior material of the window. For example, grids on an aluminum clad window would be made of aluminum and be maintenance-free. The better quality SDLs also have a filler strip located between the inner and out grids and within the sheet of insulated glass. These filler strips keep you from seeing a gap between the inner and outer grids.

SDL window grids are available in several sizes. Large windows with large panes might need thicker muntins to maintain the appropriate scale. Smaller windows might benefit from a more slender muntin profile. Simulated divided lite windows can provide a very authentic look, allow the window to be built with insulating glass, and also give you window grids that will not fall apart. SDL windows are more costly than most windows, but they provide the best and most authentic look.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Window Grids Are Important to the Style of Your House appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

Consider reinventing your house. Remodeling includes all sorts of home improvement projects. Projects that change the characteristics of your house and make it suit your new life situation are more than a simple sprucing up and remodeling. I call this “reinventing” your house. Why not consider reinventing your family house into your retirement house?

Our families and our lives evolve. When you are raising your children, an upstairs master bedroom makes sense. You want to be near the kids in case they need you during the night. But when they leave home and you are getting older, those stairs don’t look as easy to climb several times a day. And you know that as more years go by, there is some chance that you may not be able to climb them at all. Many homes can be reinvented from a family house to a retirement house with the addition of a first floor master bedroom suite. It might take some clever planning and confirmation that there is enough room on your property to do it. An architect can help you with that.  But reinventing means you won’t have to spend all that money on commissions and moving costs. Instead, that money can go directly toward the cozy first floor master bedroom suite with the fancy new bathroom you’ve dreamed of.

Staying where you are and reinventing your house has many other benefits. If you like where you currently live, if you have great neighbors, familiar stores, doctors, and restaurants nearby, if your church is around the corner, and you live close to many of the things you like, why start over? Change your house into your retirement house and let those upstairs bedrooms simply become guest rooms for the children and grandchildren.

Remodeling  and reinventing can cause some turmoil. But selling a house, buying a new one, and moving can be an even bigger hassle. And with the construction industry being slow, construction costs are down.

Spend some time thinking of what your present house could be. Ask an architect for some ideas. He or she might see things you don’t. You might surprise yourself with the possibilities.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Reinventing Your House with a First Floor Master Bedroom appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.

It can cost a lot of money to sell a house and move. Realtor fees and moving expenses can cost as much as a total kitchen makeover. So why not save the real estate commissions and moving expenses which, once spent, are gone and can never be recovered. Instead, put the money into something you can use and enjoy, something tangible like a great new kitchen or a luxurious master bathroom.

Many people were saving money in their retirement accounts to use to build or buy their home retirement. Their current homes were good for raising children, but now that the children are gone, the upstairs master bedroom and other accessibility considerations make the house inappropriate for aging occupants. But retirement accounts have taken big hits. That loss of their assets combined with the decline in value of their current house has many people finding themselves unable to afford the retirement house they dreamed of. So instead of retiring to the house of their dreams, more and more people are remodeling their current houses to be the kind of house that works for them.

This can be done by adding a ground floor master bedroom suite to permit single level living, altering and enhancing master baths to allow handicapped access and added convenience, making alterations to remove other steps within the house or at the doors, and updating the house to include the conveniences and amenities people now want and need. Formal dining rooms can be converted into home offices or libraries and studies. Screened porches, patios, and outdoor kitchens can be added to change a home from a growing family type of house to a leisure living home. Even face-lift makeovers to change the appearance of the house and re-landscaping to reduce yard maintenance can be done.

There are other intangible benefits to remodeling beyond the financial and lifestyle benefits. Staying in the neighborhood where your doctors, banks, favorite stores, churches, clubs, and friends are can make staying put a lot more gratifying than pulling up stakes and relocating. If you don’t think your present house is good for your golden years, think again. You might have the nucleus of a wonderful leisure living house right beneath your feet.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.

The post Remodeling Your House Instead of Moving Can Make Lots of Sense appeared first on Designing Your Perfect House.