Boston Home Improvement Blog

City of Boston HomeWorks Grant Program Workshop

The City of Boston is holding a workshop on Thursday, May 29 from 6-8pm at the East Boston Harborside Community Center. More on HomeWorks:

HomeWorks is a program sponsored by the City of Boston Department of Neighborhood Development (DND) that helps Boston homeowners make affordable home improvements. The goal of the program is to assist homeowners with their home improvement projects and provide them with financial and technical assistance.

HomeWorks offers conditional grants for 1/3 of the total cost of certain home improvements, up to a maximum of $4,000 or $5,000 if you paint the exterior of your house. To be eligible for this program, you must be an owner-occupant of a one to four family house, or condominium unit. Your income cannot exceed $63,000 if your household consists of one person, or $90,850 for households of two or more.

HomeWorks conditional grants can be used for just about any home improvement, i.e., update your kitchen or bath, install new windows, replace old boilers, fix rickety porches, just to name a few. To receive the grant, you must obtain the matching funds that are needed to complete your project. These funds can come from a variety of sources: your savings, a gift from your family, a loan from either a bank or a community/neighborhood development corporation.

Learn more about the workshop and registration here.

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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Gas prices on the rise; how walkable is your neighborhood?

This week the average price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. was $3.87. More people are turning to carpooling, public transportation, biking, and good old-fashioned walking in an effort to save gas money. People are hiring landscaping companies to save money on lawnmower tractor gas, and even turning to reel mowers (non-motorized) in an effort to save gas.

How walkable is your neighborhood? Enter your address at WalkScore and find out.

My neighborhood scored a 6 out of 100 (100 being the best score). I'm about 1.5 miles from anything, and yet I can walk 1.5 miles in under 30 minutes.

Then again, in the Boston area, shouldn't there be a Dunkin' Donuts within walking distance of everyone? The closest DD to my house is 1.1 miles.

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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Are Boston-area foreclosures worth buying?

The news is littered with stories about foreclosures. Opportunities are popping up everywhere, from Framingham to Fitchburg to Cambridge, to buy a foreclosed home. Here in my metroWest town an intriguing property appeared on Trulia, right down the street. An 1800 square foot home on a half acre in the $240K range.

No, it's not 1997, and it's not in a high-crime neighborhood. It's a foreclosure, with significant damage. Home buyers in the Boston area are not just looking at foreclosures to find a good home deal. They're taking coach bus tours to view foreclosures:

Srikanth Madarapu had his sights set on a Northborough home: a 3,000-square-foot contemporary Colonial priced at $439,900, yet assessed at $570,500. The house offered good curb appeal and seemed to be a phenomenal deal.

Until he walked inside. The foreclosed home was missing its kitchen. There were some appliances, but where you would expect to see cabinets and countertops, there was just empty space - ghosts of the growing national foreclosure crisis.

Madarapu was one of about two dozen potential buyers who paid Marlborough-based DCU Realty - $20 for members of its affiliated Digital Federal Credit Union, $25 for nonmembers - for a bus tour of foreclosed homes on a recent Saturday morning.

With stops in Northborough, Shrewsbury, and Westborough, the sold-out tour offered both modest and impressive homes in varying stages of disarray: torn up floors, overgrown yards, and water damage. Several were obviously in the midst of renovations when the cash ran out.

Is it worth buying a foreclosure that requires significant renovations? What about buying a home that was being renovated and the money ran out, or the owner died? Taking over a home with incomplete renovations carries significant risk. But it can also bring a big payoff if the home is priced below, and sometimes well below, market value.

The foreclosure trend isn't showing signs of ending anytime soon, and sites such as Foreclosure.com even let you see which of your neighbors are in pre-foreclosure. Home sellers in pre-foreclosure may be more likely to take a low ball price in an effort to salvage their credit, and yet the burden of the loss they incur may be greater than the burden of a foreclosure on their credit report. Pre-foreclosure may slip into foreclosure depending on each homeowner's individual situation.

There are few generalizations when it comes to the real estate market these days. Home appraisers become more valuable when assessing a foreclosure, as do home inspectors. A good general contractor can come in and give estimates for work needed to overhaul a foreclosure with damage. Finding the right professionals to help guide you through a Boston-area foreclosure can help to decrease risk, but you can't eliminate it completely.

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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When you want to DIY

Now, HomeStars is about reading, writing, and sharing reviews of home improvement contractors and retailers, and benefiting from the collective experiences of your neighbors when making a decision to hire.

But sometimes you want to do it yourself, or DIY. And sometimes you don't know what you're doing. Take my recent kitchen sink story.

My family had just moved from western Massachusetts to metroWest Boston. We sold our house in this crazy market, and the run-up to the closing meant fixing all those little problems we’d just lived with for years. The day before our house closing, we realized we needed to replace the kitchen faucet. Eighteen hours before the 10am closing, my husband climbed under the sink for a “routine” faucet removal. Five tools, four sets of knuckle skin, two trips to hardware stores, one call to my dad in Colorado, and two stripped restraining nuts later, we realized we couldn’t DIY and needed a plumber—fast!

We used HomeStars (of course!) to find a good plumber. Perhaps if I'd known about The Handy Guys and their podcast series, I'd have been better equipped to handle our plumbing issues, or other DIY crises.

The Handy Guys, Brian and Paul, join forces every week for a half-hour podcast that addresses topics ranging from lawn mower maintenance to Toilets 101. Each podcast is easy to download and comes with a long, descriptive post about the podcast itself, if you're looking for a detailed synopsis of the program before downloading.

When you're looking for DIY advice, check them out. When you're looking for a professional contractor, go to HomeStars.com

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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Boston Blogs Worth Reading

This Damn House

You've heard of This Old House, of course, but what about This Damn House? Read the long, slow story of a metroWest mother working to renovate her Natick house in preparation to sell it and move into Mosaic Commons Cohousing. Not only does Mrs. TDH nail the experience of home renovation beautifully (no pun intended), she chronicles those unexpected home renos-within-the-expected-reno that are "fun" to discover, like drywall rot in the bathroom that turns a simple project into a complete bathroom overhaul.

She even shows real before pictures, the kind that make me sigh with relief that other people with kids have houses that look like mine. Well, "before" anyway.

This is Framingham

Even if you don't live in Framingham, or view it as one long, sad stretch of mini-mall on Route 9, This is Framingham is worth a read. Written by a Framingham native with deep roots and interest in the town, she highlights little-known restaurants, local shops, local arts and culture events, and writes in a way that is compelling and makes you want to venture into downtown Framingham for a reason other than the library, and makes Framingham worth considering when househunting.

Boston Gal's Open Wallet

She's single. She owns a home in Boston and rents out a basement. She bought a condo for $25K and rents it out. She just passed $500K in net worth. She writes about Boston. She grows tomatoes indoors upside down. She just bought solar panels for her house. What more could you want? Read her.

Boston Herald's Green World

Yeah, yeah, it's an "establishment" blog run by the mainstream media. Doesn't make it any less compelling or interesting. Read up on everything green, from recycling to CO2 widgets and more.

Anyone have suggestions for other interesting blogs? Cool neighborhoods someone is chronicling? A renovation project underway that is blogged and deserves some more readership? Leave your link in the comments.

Posted by Melanie Zoltan
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