remodeling experts

Doing Your Homework As a Home Improvement Buyer

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I recently spoke with a potential client who had a hugely specified project he wanted to build, but an insufficient budget to do so. Here are some things he could have done to be a more prepared buyer:

Check out Remodeling Magazine — This is a well researched source where homeowners can go for solid answers about renovations. Prices will vary depending upon the age of the home, but it’s a great place to start your research. Start here before you hire an architect or designer to come up with a project design for you. The information is very good, and it’s FREE! Remodeling Magazine

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The Sweet Smell of Home Improvement

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Most people don’t know that their houses smell new and much nicer after they renovate. It’s kind of like “new house smell” gets sprayed on their home.

The first week or two of construction is dusty and may not smell very good. In fact, it can uncover many BAD smells, like mildew, rot or sewer gases. It’s icky. No two ways about it.

But after that phase, NEW STUFF is installed. So you smell all the new pine lumber, plywood, drywall, primer and paint, adhesives and polishes. The new cabinets often still smell of varnish or paint. Floors can smell terrible during the varnishing process, but after that they smell fantastic. In fact, two of my favorite scents include new cement and fresh wax — a fine old-time finish.

The experience of finally being able to see, touch — and smell! — so many thousands of dollars of shiny, new, wonderful stuff you ordered 6 weeks or more beforehand can be a little overwhelming. Customers can’t keep from touching and playing with things. They “oooooh” and “aaaaah,” even though they selected the goodies themselves. But the excitement can also cause them to do naughty little things, like put their fingers into wet paint or step on wet tile floors. I myself have been guilty of doing both. It’s like sticking your finger in a birthday cake to taste it. You just can’t help yourself.

Home Changes, Life Changes

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Many of our customers of replica handbags have older homes, in which large, complex or expensive projects have been delayed. Sometimes, the needed renovations are really overdue, but we are glad our customers waited until they found us to work on their homes.

Renovating a home is stressful. It costs money — sometimes a lot of it. Just to remind ourselves of these facts, we renovate our own homes from time to time.

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We’re On Vimeo! Take 2!

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Check out this cool, new trailer about our team at Myers Constructs, Inc.

This is just another example of our efforts to market our business without polluting the earth in the process. We’ve found that we don’t have to rely so much on the postal service to deliver printed marketing materials when we get great results from the organic sharing of our messages. So, please share this clip with your circle of contacts … and stay tuned for more fun media soon!

Thanks to Elfant Wissahikon Realtors!

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Thanks to Elfant Wissahickon Realtors!

We are happy to announce a new website cross-linking relationship with Elfant Wissahickon Realty . You can find us on their site under the tabs “home buying” and “related resources.”

We really appreciate this endorsement from a company we know well and respect.

We have bought and sold many properties with them, and our experience has always been wonderful.

Thanks, again, to Elfant Wissahickon for their endorsement of Myers Constructs.

How Do You Know It’s Time? Part 3

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Last week, we got a call from a woman who said her house felt too small now that her son had become a teen, and she was also dissatisfied with the outside of her home, but she wasn’t sure how to fix those problems. A quick Zillow search told us that this woman’s neighbors all had 4-bedroom homes with 2-3 bathrooms, while she was living in a 3-bedroom, 1-bath house. The “bird’s eye” view of her neighborhood told us that most of her neighbors had put additions on their homes to increase their size, and their homes were now worth 1/3 more than her house, even in this time of conservative appraisals.

We find that this is a common problem facing homeowners:

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Blogging and the Brand Connection

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Our company has recently been exploring cross-blogging opportunities, and we’ve had some success doing so. In fact, just this morning, we sent off a draft of a blog we will be sharing with a local landscape designer for her e-newsletter. Throughout this process, some issues have arisen — mostly relating to protecting and enhancing our brand strength/recognition.

There were times, for instance, when we passed on an opportunity to participate in another company’s blog because the inviting party did not understand our message/brand. Some of those sites were just collecting other bloggers in the field of remodeling, and they didn’t have any real connection to what we do. One example was a “Do It Yourself” website that helps homeowners do their own home remodeling. That’s just not our message. It’s not what we sell. Another example was a blogger who wanted to post what we felt was a sexist message. Again, not something we wanted to participate in. We felt that cross-blogging with these sites would not have been good exposure, and could have even damaged our brand.

Of course, we don’t want to limit ourselves to the narrow approach of working only with companies that are very similar to our own, but we do look for partners who have a complementary product/service line, personality and target market. Just as, say, a professional chef might look to share her blog with websites specializing in city living, parenting, food allergies, food associations and professional organizations.

Finding the right partners for these relationships isn’t an exact science, and we don’t have a checklist for making good choices when cross-blogging. But we do have a keen eye for protecting our company from risk.

What Can You Learn From a Brick?

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Fake Rolex

The brick is an iconic building element to those of us who live on the East Coast, where old cities are built from millions and millions of red bricks. Therefore, a brick seems like a good place to start when considering what it costs the environment to build a house. In fact, readers may remember an article previously posted on our fake Rolex website, entitled “New Construction Pollutes!” In that post, we asked folks to speculate about the size of the carbon footprint made by the bricks used to build an average-sized Philadelphia rowhome.

We explained that to make just one brick, 1.4 pounds of carbon is burned and released into the atmosphere.

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