Green Real Estate Appraiser

How much should new flooring cost?

Posted on July 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

What is the right price to pay for flooring?

Many homeowners fear they’ll receive an inferior flooring product by paying too little, or get overcharged by unscrupulous contractors.

For the average consumer, it’s hard to know a good deal from a bad one. To help consumers crack the flooring price code, Angie’s List asked three flooring experts how much homeowners should expect to pay for new carpet, hardwood and tile flooring.

Will new flooring add value to your home? contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for your home value questions.

Carpet: Unlike tile or wood flooring, which is priced by the square foot only, carpet is priced by the square yard or square foot, making an apples-to-apples comparison challenging.However, converting the square yard price into square feet isn’t difficult; just divide it by 9. For example, carpet priced at $27 a yard costs $3 a square foot, says Tom Manion, owner of Manion Door to Door Flooring of Austin, Tex.

Average carpet prices start at $2 a square foot and increase with quality. Middle-grade quality carpet ranges from $3 to $4 a square foot, and high grades and designer grades cost about $5 or more per square foot. According to Costhelper, expect to pay an additional $2.50 to $6 per square foot for padding and $2 to $6 per square foot for installation.

disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only

D.C. couple on tight budget tries for Net-Zero on fixer-upper home

Posted on July 27, 2015 | Leave a comment

A net-zero home is one that produces all of its own clean and renewable energy. They tend to be new construction or gut remodeling projects because it’s easier to get to net zero by building super-insulated spaces that don’t require much to heat and cool, then add top-of-the-line geothermal heating systems, heat pumps, solar panels and other “green bling” to operate them as efficiently as possible.

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

Patrick Hughes and Amy Sticklor began their do-it-yourself approach in fall 2013, shortly after purchasing their first home in Washington’s Atlas District. Instead of replacing big-ticket items such as the aging furnace and boiler (both of which still have a few years of service left in them), they slashed their energy usage in half with less than $500 in insulation, new lighting and other equipment available at the average hardware store or online.

Updates alone made it possible to run their entire 952-square-foot, two-bedroom home for several months of the year without exceeding the amount of energy produced by the solar array they had installed on their rooftop. Their utility bills have plummeted. In environmental terms, meanwhile, Hughes says the couple have saved 1,238.5 kilowatt-hours of power by lowering their energy usage alone. That’s equivalent to planting 22 tree seedlings that would remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over 10 years or driving 2,033 fewer miles.

“It goes to show that you can get really significant energy savings without spending a lot of money,” says Hughes, who has done most of the handiwork and tracks the couple’s progress on a spreadsheet.

disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only.

Thinking about taking out a mortgage? Don’t obsess over the Fed

Posted on July 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

For most people, trying to parse the intentions of the Fed should play nearly no role in a decision of when to take out a mortgage or other loan. You should make your borrowing decisions based on current market rates and whether they make a given home purchase or refinancing decision affordable or not. Assume that neither you, nor your mortgage broker, nor your Uncle Ned, who watches a lot of Wall Street sharpies on CNBC, has any predictive capacity to know whether rates will be higher or lower a month from now.

Why would this be? Doesn’t the Fed set interest rates? Well, yes. But there are a lot of complexities that stand between that basic fact and the reality of what it will cost you to take out a home loan.

The Fed indeed sets a target for overnight bank lending rates, and buys and sells securities in order to keep market rates at that level. It has kept that rate near zero since the end of 2008, and is now making noises about raising it later this year, perhaps as soon as September.

That’s all well and good, but there are two things to remember. 1) Mortgages are usually based on long-term interest rates, not short-term interest rates, and 2) The Fed is not on some preordained path; rather, its policy will adjust depending on how the economy evolves.

The first point is crucial. When lenders make you a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, they are essentially making a bet on the value of money for quite a long time. And in practice, that rate is set not by the whims of the banker at your local strip mall, but by the $21 trillion global bond market.

disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only

How much should new flooring cost?

D.C. couple on tight budget tries for Net-Zero on fixer-upper home

Thinking about taking out a mortgage? Don’t obsess over the Fed

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