Allergy-Proof Your Home
With many plants and flowers starting to bloom this time of year, outdoor adventures can be a challenging time for seasonal allergy sufferers. And while many allergy sufferers may seek out higher elevation destinations like Lake Tahoe because we are known for not having much in the way of spring vegetation, just remember that we have our share of allergens, mainly in the form of pine pollen which usually rolls in around early summer.
But even if you’re among those lucky enough not to suffer from seasonal allergies, you’re not entirely off the hook because there are plenty of allergens in and around our homes that may alert allergic reactions.
Fortunately, Reader’s Digest.com has provided some simple ways to keep these irritants under control. Following some of these suggestions may help to make your home a no-sneeze zone:
1. Keep it Clean
Common allergens like mold, dust, and dust mites are drawn to dirty places. Make them feel unwelcome by avoiding clutter, giving your home a thorough cleaning at least once a week, and regularly taking out the trash and recycling.
2. Upgrade Your Vacuum
If you have a pet, you’ve seen how much hair can collect in your carpets and rugs. And if the fur’s there, you can be sure sneeze-inducing dander is too. Invest in a vacuum with a HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filter to suck up as many allergens as possible.
3. Bleach the Bathroom
Mold and fungus thrive in warm, damp bathrooms. Give them the boot with a weekly bleach wipe-down. An ounce of bleach in a quart of water will do the trick.
4. Beware of Crumbs
Crumbs and other food scraps attract mice and insects. Cut off their food supply by keeping the floors swept, the counters scrubbed, and the sink free of dirty dishes.
5. Combat Humidity
If mold is your enemy, a dehumidifier is your best defense. Set it between 35 and 45 percent and, if you live in a house, keep it in the basement where mold often breeds.
6. Close the Windows
During allergy season, the choice is yours: breezes or sneezes. If you’re plagued by seasonal allergies, fresh air is, unfortunately, not your friend. Keep the windows closed during peak pollen hours (10 a.m.-3 p.m.). In warm weather, using the AC helps keep indoor air pollen-free, as long as you regularly change the filters.
Get even more ideas for allergy proofing your home at health.com.
Source: health.com and ReadersDigest.com
As always, please feel free to contact Mackenzie with your individual/specific questions regarding your South Lake Tahoe home!
Search ALL Lake Tahoe Homes by visiting www.MakeTahoeMine.com or Google … “Make Tahoe Mine”
HAFA Short Sales
C.A.R.’s Member Legal Services has published a revised legal article entitled “HAFA Short Sales Fact Sheet” (April 11, 2011). It is available on www.car.org on “What’s New,” the Legal Articles pages, and the 2011 Q&As page.
http://www.car.org/legal/foreclosure-short-sale-folder/hafa-short-sales/
HAFA is a government-subsidized Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives program for distressed homeowners to sell their homes to avoid foreclosure, even if the sales price is not enough to pay off their existing mortgage loans. This chart has been revised to reflect the recent changes to the HAFA program. Citation links have been added to the chart.
In addition, the “HAFA Short Sale Time Periods” has been added as a new chart highlighting all of the relevant time periods for actions taken by the lender/servicer or borrower.
http://www.car.org/legal/foreclosure-short-sale-folder/hafa-short-sale-time-periods/
For more information : Click here and/or please contact Mackenzie Martin: 530-318-3099 / mackenzie@MakeTahoeMine.com
*Information Courtesy of The South Tahoe Association of REALTORS Staff
As always, please feel free to contact Mackenzie with your individual/specific questions regarding your South Lake Tahoe home!
Search ALL Lake Tahoe Homes by visiting www.MakeTahoeMine.com or Google … “Make Tahoe Mine”
Mistakes to Avoid When Trying to Sell Your Home
If you are thinking of putting your home on the market, here are six valuable tips from Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Consumer Educator for Trulia.com and Reader’s Digest
1. Stalker-ish sellers. You might think you’re being helpful by following the buyer through your home and pointing out your favorite features. However, the buyers might be trying really hard to ignore, minimize, or figure out how to undo the very features of your home you hold dear. They also may want or need to have personal space and conversations with their mate or their agent while they’re viewing your home.
What’s a seller to do? Back off. Let your home be shown vacant, or leave the house when people come to see it. If the buyers have questions, their people will contact your people.
2. Shabby, dirty, crowded and/or smelly houses. You already know this one. Yet, buyers constantly marvel at the state of disrepair and disorder some homes are in when they are shown.
What’s a seller to do? Other than listing your home at a competitive price, the only tool within your control for differentiating your home from all the foreclosures and short sales is to show it in tip-top shape. Pre-pack your place up, getting rid of as many of your personal effects as possible. Do not show it without it being completely spic-and-span.
3. Irrational seller expectations. Buying a house on today’s market is hard work! With so many homes on the market, the last thing buyers want or need to add to their task lists is trying to argue a seller out of unreasonable expectations or pricing. When they see a home whose seller is clearly clueless about their home’s value and has priced it sky-high, most often they won’t bother even looking at it.
What’s a seller to do? Get real. Get out there and look at the other properties that are for sale in your area and price range. Get multiple agents’ take on what your home should be listed at, and don’t take it personally if their recommendation is low. Don’t be tempted into testing your market with an obviously too-high price, unless you’re prepared to have your home lag on the market and get lowball offers.
4. Feeling misled. You will never trick someone into buying your home. If the listing pictures are photo-edited, or your neighborhood is described as funky and vibrant, as code for the fact that your house is under the train tracks, buyers will figure this out.
What’s a seller to do? Buyers rely on sellers to be upfront and honest – so be both. If your home has features or aspects that are often perceived negatively, your home’s listing probably shouldn’t lead with them. But don’t go out of your way to slant, skew, or spin the facts which will be obvious to anyone who visits your home.
5. New, ugly home improvements. New home improvements that run totally counter to a buyer’s aesthetics are a big turn-off, because in today’s era of “conspicuous frugality,” buyers just can’t cotton to ripping out expensive, brand new, perfectly functioning things just on the basis of style – especially since they’ll feel like they paid for these things in the price of the home.
What’s a seller to do?Check in with a local broker or agent before you make a big investment in a pre-sale remodel. They can give you a reality check about the likely return on your investment, and help you prioritize about which projects to do (or not).
6. Crazy listing photos (or no photos at all). I’ve seen listing photos featuring dumpsters, piles of laundry, and once, even the family dog doing his or her business in the lovely front yard. Listing pictures that put your home in anything but its best, accurate light are a very quick way to ensure that you turn off a huge number of buyers from even coming to see your house! The only bigger buyer turn-off than these bizarre listing pictures are listings that have no photos at all.
What’s a seller to do? Check your home’s listing online and make sure that the photos represent your home well. If not, ask your agent to grab some new shots and get them online, stat!
As always, please feel free to contact Mackenzie with your individual/specific questions regarding your South Lake Tahoe home!
Search ALL Lake Tahoe Homes by visiting www.MakeTahoeMine.com or Google … “Make Tahoe Mine”
Home Improvement Tips
As Spring gets under way, many of us will be inspired to tackle some home improvement projects!
For those home owners in areas where the winter months have brought an abundance of snow, ice and rain, as we have definitely experienced in Lake Tahoe this past season, one may want to focus their attention to the exterior of their home. Maintaining a home on a regular basis can save you a lot of money in deferred maintenance costs. By staining decks, touching up exterior paint, replacing roof shingles, tightening gutters, inspecting heat tape and sealing the driveway on a yearly basis you may be able to defer replacement costs for some higher ticket items.
If you are thinking of selling, it’s especially critical that a Buyer see that your home has been cared for on a consistent basis. Once a Buyer sees that a home has been obviously neglected or has deferred maintenance, they can’t help but wonder what else may be wrong, especially in less obvious/accessible areas like the attic and crawl space.
To give yourself added peace of mind in these unseen areas, be sure to get a pest-termite inspection/home inspection every so often. The inspector will look in less noticeable areas like the crawl space and attic for things like carpenter ants, fungus, cellulose debris, plumbing leaks and termites. The sooner you can correct these items, the more manageable future repairs many be.
Before tackling these tasks, we may want to take into consideration some of these helpful hints from Bill and Kevin Burnett of Inman News™…
10 rules for power tools
1. Inspect your tools before use. Inspect especially for frayed power cords and cracked or broken casings. If the tool is damaged, have it repaired by a qualified technician or toss it.
2. Follow instructions, not intuition. Maintain and use power tools in accordance with the manufacturer’s warnings, precautions and instructions.
3. Check the switch on power tools and garden appliances to make sure it’s in the off position before you plug it in.
4. Keep your tools in shape. Don’t carry tools by the cord and never yank the cord when removing it from an outlet. When disconnecting the cord, always grasp the plug, not the wire. Keep the cord away from heat, oil and sharp edges.
5. When necessary, use clamps or a vise to hold work in place. This frees both hands to operate the tool.
6. Buy a saw with a blade guard and don’t disable it. Before operating saws with guards, make sure they are in place and in proper working order. Kevin’s father-in-law was a master brickmason. To increase productivity, he wired the blade guard on his circular saw in the open position. Production increased until the day he set the still-running saw in his lap.
7. Prevent against kickback. If a saw blade begins to bind, immediately stop the cut and hold the saw and work piece completely still. Wait for the saw blade to stop before pulling away from a cut.
8. Discard saw blades that are chipped, bent or in any way damaged.
9. Never leave an active power tool unattended. Unplug power tools before leaving the room and store them out of children’s reach.
10. Remove all jewelry before using power tools.
If you are thinking of selling your Lake Tahoe home and would like advice on what you can do to improve your home, maximize its marketability and curb appeal in order to get the highest value for it, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Happy home improving!
As always, please feel free to contact Mackenzie with your individual/specific questions regarding your South Lake Tahoe home!
Search ALL Lake Tahoe Homes by visiting www.MakeTahoeMine.com or Google … “Make Tahoe Mine”
HARP (Home Affordable Refinance Program) Program Extended Through June 30, 2012
HARP – Home Affordable Refinance Program, recently announced that they will stay in business through June 30, 2012 and Freddie Mac will exempt the re-financings from recently announced price increases, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in announcing the one-year extension.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will continue to refinance qualifying borrowers who have lost equity in their home without requiring additional mortgage insurance for another year under the Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP.
If you think you may qualify for this program, you may want to act soon. Qualifying requires the submission of lots of paperwork and can be a time consuming process.
Too, not all homeowners will qualify, there are several measures that are used to determine eligibility for the program, below is a list provided by the HARP website:
Eligibility*
You may be eligible to apply if you meet all of the following:
- You have a mortgage owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
- You do not have an FHA, VA or USDA loan.
- You are current on your mortgage payments and have not been more than 30 days late making a payment over the last year.
- You owe more than the home is worth, but your mortgage does not exceed 125 percent of the current market value of your home.
- The refinance will improve the long-term affordability or stability of your mortgage.
- You have the ability to make the new payments.
*Eligibility criteria are for guidance only. Contact your mortgage servicer to see if you qualify for HARP.
Re: Inman News, Monday, March 14, 2011 and http://www.makinghomeaffordable.gov
As always, please feel free to contact Mackenzie with your individual/specific questions regarding your South Lake Tahoe home!
Search ALL Lake Tahoe Homes by visiting www.MakeTahoeMine.com or Google … “Make Tahoe Mine”
