renovation experts

Significant Home Ruined by Poor Window Choice?

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A couple of years ago, I toured a home that was for sale and built by esteemed architect Louis Kahn. It was a lovely 3-bedroom, 2-bath, very modest-sized gem of a house in Elkins Park, a suburb just outside the city limits of Philadelphia. At that time, I was looking to move, and I found this house very charming and beautiful. Everything about this house “fit” within it. The yard was well tended with mature plantings and a small stream. The price was not out of reach. But, in the end, it was just too small for our family. But I’m so glad I took the opportunity to go see it because it reminded me about an important lesson: windows can make or break a house, even an architecturally significant one.

If you visit the Louis Kahn Wikipedia page, you can see the house I am talking about on the right-hand side, and I’ve included an image in this post.

When I saw this house, it was almost completely original and “un-remuddled.”

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We’re in The News!

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Discussing modern day marketing and how we do it in :

Remodeling Magazine

We are moving to e marketing because it’s more sustainable than snail mail. E marketing doesn’t require little gas powered trucks driving all over to deliver cards with our contact info on them.

But in order for this to work we need your help. When you share our newsletters and other marketing materials with your friends and neighbors, you are helping all of us be more sustainable!

“Plumb Level Square” Does Not Always Apply

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Plumb Level Square is a touch stone phrase carpenters and other craftsmen use to be sure their work is tidy. But it doesn’t always apply. Here is the proof. Enjoy the show!

These photos were taken at The Wooden Boat Show hosted by The Antique Boat Museum in Clayton NY. Its a fine museum with many open water slips and covered galleries where they show off amazing wooden craft of the Finger Lakes Region in NY.

Anyone who appreciates wooden construction methods will be blown away by the craftsmanship and engineering of these craft. It’s no easy task to make wood take these shapes!

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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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.