When I read that Irv Gordon from Patchogue, New York, had logged almost 3,000,000 miles on his 1966 Volvo P1800, I thought that surely I had misread that number.  Three hundred thousand, yes, but 3,000,000?  I was not mistaken, and Irv attributes his car’s exceptional longevity to painstaking maintenance.

     With some facsimile of such discipline, our homes can also get great mileage.

     My home is celebrating its 278^th New Year, having witnessed the American Revolution, the Civil War, two World Wars, the Depression, presidential assassination, and terrorist attack, along with the invention of electricity, indoor plumbing, technological wonders, and normal wear and tear to the structure itself.  Just since I have owned it, there has been a roof leak, flooded basement, the last gasp of a hot water heater, then the boiler, and the most spectacular occurrence when the transformer on my corner exploded and blew my electrical panel completely off the basement wall. 

     But, on the positive side I can see that the guardians of the house prior to me had taken steps to upgrade and maintain it through the years, and I have tried my best to continue that tradition. However, sometimes life gets in the way. 

   I was spoiled by my previous home. It had been completely renovated just before I bought it and I never had to do anything to keep in going for the five years of my ownership. I couldn’t get away with a continuing free pass after living for more than 30 years in my new, old home. But, embarrassed as I am to admit it, I’ve usually waited until something has malfunctioned before attending to it, rather than taking preventative measures.

    And that’s probably a natural thing for most of us. Realistically, when was the last time you cleaned your chimney or, better yet, drained your hot water tank?

    For those of you who want to join me in making a New Year’s resolution to gift your home with proper maintenance, click here is a checklist of the basic “to dos.”

Checklist for Home Maintenance

Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at bill@PrimaveraRealEstate.com or call 914-522-2076.

Our homes are where we eat, sleep, play, sometimes work, and store things we’ve finished using but somehow can’t bear to throw away. There are many reasons we may want to hold on to stuff we no longer need, but where do we put it all?

Granted, some homeowners achieve living on the light side where nothing is hidden and what you see is what you get. Or, they’ve gotten religion just before the sale of a home. The homes on the market which show best are those where all the traditional storage spaces – the attic, basement, garage and large closets -- are bare.

In my own home, my attic looks like a commercial storage facility, but not as neat.  A few years ago when my wife and I went through one of our phases of wanting to sell our home, we hired a crew to clean out our basement which had been packed with stuff from cement floor to beams overhead. There was clear evidence there of many different careers and lifetimes, including those of our parents and grandparents, along with leftover materials from house renovation.

One helper took me aside and told me how dangerous it was to have saved enamel paint and paint thinner so close to the boiler. Fortunately it was before I started writing a newspaper column called The Home Guru, so I was only half embarrassed.  At first, it was a visceral experience to instruct the workers what to throw out for bulk pick up. But as the project wore on and I wore out, memories were discarded wholesale.  It felt liberating.

For the full story, go to:

How to Store Stuff in the Home

Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at bill@PrimaveraRealEstate.com or call 914-522-2076.

When I was 13 years old, I got the urge to decorate my own room as my breakout effort to establish my own identity and, with my mother’s permission, I painted my room bright red.

There was nothing too odd about that, but convinced that the room looked too stark and needed some pattern, I dressed the two windows with drapes that I found in a storage trunk in the attic.  The problem was that the drapes were a green, yellow and pink floral print on a white background. Can you visualize the end result?

A couple of years later when my family decided to sell our home and the first prospective buyers visited, the wife entered that room and exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”  My mother was convinced that it was my room alone that scared them away.

 I had never heard the term “too taste specific” until I got into real estate, and lately I’ve been hearing it a lot. Maybe it’s that, in the recession, homes for sale have to appeal to the widest possible audience. And indeed, conventional wisdom has told us that the more “neutralized” the interior, the better.

But maybe we’ve taken that principle too far.

I’ve noticed that some interior designers who blog have started posting their frustrations with clients who are timid about expressing their true selves in decorating for fear of offending some future home buyer.  Flying in the face of “vanilla and white bread,”  more decorators are now advising their clients not to trap themselves  into an existence of visually blah surroundings, waiting for the approval or at least the tolerance of some one else.

In support of stepping out of neutrality when decorating, one interior designer recently blogged that “Life is over faster than anyone wants to admit.  So, leave a mark already!” 

Another blog posting I liked from a savvy realtor was, “When a home stager insists that something is ‘too taste specific,’ what she’s really saying in a polite way is that it’s just too damned ugly to remain!”   

A couple of interesting case studies can be found at:

 Too Taste Specific?

Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at 914-522-2076.

As we know from reports in the media or from our own experience, office workers many times clash about a temperature in which to work. But, what happens when people share the same household and can’t agree on a comfortable temperature either in the hottest or coldest seasons?

And what is the accepted ideal temperature for a home anyway? That can vary as much as the individual households involved.

The biggest problem with temperature preferences occurs when two or more people share the same roof on a day to day basis.  With the extreme variances in weather we have endured recently, my own thermostat has never gotten such a workout with changed settings, mostly suggested by my wife, asking for more heat.  There is a scientific reason for that.  Women simply get colder than men because they have less muscle, and muscle insulates the body.

The ideal room temperature has been a matter of debate for some time because people and their bodies vary so much, and the very function of the room would add to the equation. There would be a difference between the temperature of a family room or game room during the day where the ideal setting might be 71 or 72 degrees F., and a bedroom temperature at night, which might be 64 or 65 degrees F.  But those are the temperatures recommended by various public health agencies and they do not take into account individual preferences for comfort.

Today there is an answer to the problem of varying temperature preferences with the newer hydro-air systems for heating and air conditioning where a home owner, if so inclined, can have varying temperatures in every room in the house. And that would seem ideal to have the baby and grandma in warmer rooms, and the star athlete in a cooler room where he or she also studies.

Of course, that still doesn’t solve the challenge of a man and woman sharing the same bedroom where he likes it cold and she likes it warmer.

Click on the link here to see how I solved that problem in my own home.

She's Cold, He's Hot

Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at 914-522-2076.

“There are certain plumbing issues that some buyers and their realtors should be aware of when they consider a home for sale,” my plumber Mark Merone said when visiting to repair a broken "el" pipe in my shower.  “You need to pay attention to the quality of materials that bring water into the house from the street or well and take it away to the septic or sewer, and whether those materials are up to code.” 

He said that plumbers normally don’t have a lot of problems with the fixtures themselves, such as toilets, kitchen sinks and bathtubs, but they do have problems with the pipes that deliver and drain the water.   

“Besides the quality of the piping, a homebuyer should want to know the condition of the hot water tank and boiler that both will need attention on a continuing basis, and the kind of heating system the house has,” Mark said. “The engineer who does the inspection will know good piping practices and, if they are below code, he will suggest certain changes, such as eventually substituting galvanized piping with copper or PVC. The more up to code the piping is, the fewer plumbing problems the homebuyer will have in the future.”

To know more about plumbing problems and solutions, read:

Eeek! A Leak!

Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at 914-522-2076.

In a way, as a realtor, you have to be all things to all people, from marketing expert and researcher to basic hand-holder. And if anyone is wondering what goes on in the mind of a realtor who likes to write under the moniker "The Home Guru," it's going to be a hodge-podge of subjects as varied as toilet design, dust, haunted and stigmatized houses, the disappearance of the front porch and why, St. Joseph as home seller, the kiss of death to a home sale (parents!), mold, plumbing, electricity and yes, even the kitchen sink.

Here are some observations I've made in my contacts with people, places and things involved with the home and garden, as well as buying and selling homes.

Musings of The Home Guru

Bill Primavera is a realtor with Coldwell Banker in Yorktown Heights, New York, representing all of Westchester and Putnam Counties. (www.PrimaveraHomes.com). Also he writes as "The Home Guru" a weekly newspaper, The Examiner, distributed throughout both counties.  He can be reached at 914-522-2076

My friend Mike Piccirillo, an architect, says, "Nobody in the past 20 years has ever once asked me to design a split-level home, but a lot of people have asked me to re-design already-existing splits for a more contemporary look and more open space."

While it offered hot sizzle among builders and homebuyers in the 1950s and 1960s, the split totally fizzled by 1970. Nevertheless, splits are a significant part of our residential landscape in the Northeast, as across the entire nation, because they were built at the height of the post-WWII suburban Housing boom.

Most of these homes are still standing and not many are disguised to hide what they are, unlike raised ranches, now being treated to "re-do's" as mock colonials by adding a few details to the facade like a portico with columns. 

That's harder to do with the lopsided configuration of a splilt, having one story where the living room, dining room and kitchen reside, and a connecting two-story structure with stairs that drop a half flight in either edirection, ascending to the bedrooms and bath above and usually a family room and a garage below.

To learn how a split "re-do" can be tackled, visit:

The Split Can Sizzle Again

Bill Primavera is a realtor in Westchester, NY, and "The Home Guru" columnist writing on all subjects relating to homes and real estate. Visit his website at: www.PrimaveraHomes.com or call him direclty at 914-522-2076.

For some years, I pretty much ignored recommending that my clients purchase a home warranty policy when buying or selling a home, but an associate of mine told me that she considers this a real service and it should always be suggested. 

With this program, the seller is covered for the home's systems and appliances during the course of the listing and, at closing, the buyer is covered for a full year of service. For the seller, it helps make the listing stand out among others, and for the buyer, it gives a feeling of confidence that the situation will be covered if something goes wrong.

It would seem to be a win-win, wouldn't it?

For the full story, visit:

Home Warranties

With a wildly rainy season capped off by a hurricane (or was it a tropical storm?), never have I heard the term French drain more frequently as we all grappled to deal with wet basements.  Basically a French drain is little more than a trench with gravel and a perforated PVC pipe, but it can do wonders in diverting water away from the house.  Along with some other tips, it IS possible to have a dry basement, even if your area is cursed with a high water table.  Here's the scoop:

The French Drain

Bill Primavera is a realtor (wwwlPrimaveraRealEstate.com) associated with Coldwell Banker in Westchester, New York, as well as a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in lifestyles and homestyles and a syndicated columnist known as The Home Guru. He can be reached at Bill@PrimaveraRealEstate.com or directly at 914-522-2076

Has anyone else noticed that the traditional front porch has all but disappeared from today's house plans?  There was a time (way before my time), especially during the 18th and 19th centuries where front porches were ubiquitous across our land.  They served a purpose for socialization. But, after World War II, with the availability of television and air conditioning, most people retreated to their houses or their back decks or patios for more privacy.  In effect, Facebook is today's front porch and those hold-outs who build them today may do be showing neighbors what they'd be doing...if they had the time to do it. Read the full story at:

Why the Front Porch Disappeared

Bill Primavera is a Realtor (www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com) in New York representing all of beautiful Westchester and Putnam Counties above Manhattan. He also is a marketing practitioner (www.PrimaveraPR.com) specializing in the lifestyles arena, and writes a syndicated column called “The Home Guru” which deals with all aspects of the housing market, design, decorating and landscaping. He can reached directly at 914-522-2076.

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