Green Real Estate Appraiser

Many homeowners would never let sports gear, tools and yard equipment clutter up the front hall where it’s the first things guests see.

But they’re willing to wend their own way into the house through a garage stuffed with those things, plus patio furniture, bikes, holiday decorations and more, says Todd Carter of Tailored Living featuring Premier Garage, in Reston, Virginia.

Will this add value to your home?  Contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for your value questions.

The company focuses on renovating and improving garages, and that’s a hot area in home renovation, experts say. From cabinetry and shelving to flooring and overhead storage, there are many new ways to turn a garage into an organized and attractive space for storage, entertaining or working out.

The trend has been made possible by today’s larger garages.

“The sky’s the limit,” said Greg Parsons, owner of Motor City Garages in Clarkston, Michigan. “It’s all based on the homeowner’s stuff.”

He routinely outfits garages with high-end, scratch-resistant cabinetry, sinks and epoxy flooring — an easy-to-clean coating that comes in numerous colours and finishes. He recently added a line of cabinetry that lets buyers customize the colour to match their car.

Some homeowners end up adding televisions and seating, Parsons said.

Jeff and Linda Marsack of Macomb, Michigan, hired Parsons to organize their two-car garage. They added cabinets to store shoes, sporting equipment and tools. She chose red cabinets to match their kitchen.

read more at: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Garage+upgrades+make+room+storage+entertaining/11725150/story.html

During the bust that followed last decade’s housing boom, hundreds of thousands of Californians lost their homes to foreclosure. It was a process later found to be rife with problems, such as overwhelmed bank employees who sometimes didn’t even read the foreclosure documents in front of them.

But challenging foreclosures on the basis of paperwork problems proved to be mostly futile, given California courts had ruled that borrowers who weren’t paying their mortgages didn’t suffer financial harm.