Nesting and Investing

Buying a new home is a pricey proposition. Not only do you obviously pay and borrow for the sales price you negotiate with the seller, but there are closing costs like transfer and recordation taxes, escrow funding charges, and other loan fees and deed costs. Then you need to move your belongings, and even if you move yourself, there are costs for trucks, setting up utilities, packing materials and the like.

Once you move in, there may be features of the house you want to improve right away. You want to make this house your home, to nest. Maybe your son wants his room painted orange. And you want to remove the old carpet from the den. Perhaps you want to enhance the storage capabilities of the house (more on closet extenders in another post). And you might be like one of my recent buyer clients, who wanted to invest in increasing the energy efficiency and reliability of her home's systems. 

This particular home, built in 1940, came with a creaky old oil boiler which provided both heat and hot water to the house. Basically the furnace was running year round to provide hot showers and the like; not particularly energy efficient. My buyer client, now the new homeowner, invested in a new natural gas boiler for heating and a separate gas hot water heater.

The happy homeowner anticipates her energy bills to be drastically reduced. Of course there were upfront costs to invest in future savings and energy efficiency. She shared the numbers with me:
$9,800 to remove the oil tank from the utility room, leaving more space for storage too, plus the equipment and installation of the two pieces shown on the right.
$2,125 to install a new stainless steel flue liner into the chimney stack for safe ventilation of the new gas boiler.

She also gains peace of mind with new systems, a dedicated water heater, no need for oil delivery to the house, freed up a corner in the utility room with the removal of the oil tank to provide more storage space, easier future maintenance for the modern systems, and immediate monthly savings.  

She nested (the dining room in particular looks great in its lovely new shade of blue) and invested (it is a beautiful new boiler).

Holidays in a New Home

When you move into a new home, there are many firsts. First night sleeping there, first snowstorm, first spring blooms, first time the power goes out, maybe even the first time you bring home a newborn from the hospital. This time of year I particularly enjoy the concept of the first holiday in a new home.

A long-standing tradition in my family is the collection of Christmas ornaments.  We maintain lists of the new ornaments each year, documented by family member. My Mom used to keep the lists and I still have the original list from my childhood. The lists are treasured as they help me remember when I got a certain ornament and maybe even who gave it to me. We tuck the lists in a safe place for 11 months of the year, so safe in fact that one year we could not find the lists. The following Christmas season we discovered the lists, pressed between pages of the Bible.

Commemorating the first holiday in a new home with a special Christmas ornament or other holiday momento is a tradition I will carry on with my real estate clients. What holiday traditions around house and home do you treasure?