News from Trace Ventures

Deciding whether to remodel or sell your home is a dilemma faced by many homeowners. Art Stinson, our fearless leader and home remodeling guru, offers the following quick tips and advice to help you get to the heart of the matter. We hope you find them enlightening.

Art’s advice for making the right decision – should you remodel or sell?

1. Do you like your location, your neighbors, your yard? The shopping? The schools? The commute? If these are problems, realize they will not go away no matter how much work you do to your home.

2. What is your house worth and what would it be worth after the project? Get a real estate agent involved early on to assess the impact of a project on your home’s value. Then if you do decide to sell, you will already know a good resource.

3. How long are you planning to live there? If five years or more, remodeling lets you benefit from living in a space tailored exactly to your lifestyle while simultaneously increasing your home’s value. If only a year or two, don’t bother. Let the new owners do the work.

4. How does your home measure up to those around you? The most worthwhile investment is a remodeling project that brings your home up to the level of your neighbors’ or to no more than 20% above the median sale price for your neighborhood.

5. Have you weighed the cost of moving against the cost of remodeling? You will spend 8% to 10% of your home’s sale price on fees and moving-related expenses. The cost of updating a kitchen or bath may actually be more affordable.

With today’s slow housing market, who wants to sell when it isn’t financially advantageous? At the same time, if you plan to move within five years after the remodel is complete, then selling may be your best option. If you’re still not sure, feel free to give us a call and we’ll be glad to talk over the possibilities together.

We gathered the troops and a few daughters one Saturday and – voila! – a mini-makeover was completed in short order at Smithson-Craighead Academy, a Metro Nashville charter school designed especially for children at risk of failing in grades K-4.  Located in northern Davidson County on Brick Church Pike, 90 percent of the children enrolled there are on free or reduced lunch. Most come from a culture of poverty with parents unable to provide the support and encouragement needed for academic and life success.

Joining up with Hands On Nashville, here are just a few of the tasks we performed to the inside and outside of a very old building, from applying some good old-fashioned elbow grease to performing technical repairs:

• Repair broken cafeteria seats and classroom desks
• Diagnose and remedy persistent roof leak
• Repair gutters and downspouts
• Remove loose and missing floor tiles and install new
• Paint walls
• Pick up litter
• Rake leaves and weed
• Spread mulch
• Leave in much better condition than found
• Celebrate accomplishments with lunch at Swett’s

Interesting links:

Click here to see a two-minute video of our mini-makeover!
Hands On Nashville
Smithson Craighead Academy

Our own Mark Holliday, CR, has earned the Certified-Aging-In-Place Specialist (CAPS) designation. This universal design specialty means friendlier homes – from wider doorways and no-step entries to easy-to-use faucets and light switches.

Seventy-seven million people will reach retirement age in the early decades of the 21^st century. Aging in place is a specialized remodeling field that allows people to stay in their own homes as they grow older, rather than being forced to relocate. To help people maintain active lives within a framework of changing physical ability, a CAPS remodeler can make modifications such as adjusting the height of sinks and appliances, replacing standard doorknobs with easy-to-operate levers, and many others.

CAPS is a collaboration between the National Association of Home Builders and AARP. To learn more, give us a call or visit this page on the web.

The Public-Private Partnership for Advancing Housing Technology (PATH) recommends 10 top remodeling projects for making existing homes more durable and resource efficient. The top 10 list includes everything from proper air sealing through insulation and caulking to giving old wood new life by using recycled flooring, and much more.

Click Here to download the list.