A Smart DC MD Real Estate Team to guide you home
Now that the House and Senate have passed their own versions of tax reform, homeowners are wondering what’s next? There’s no reason to panic just yet because we don’t know which version will be adopted. Furthermore, the majority of mortgage interest deductions won’t be affected anyway since the majority of mortgages are under $500,000. For the higher priced areas we certainly hope that the Senate version will prevail.
Here’s a breakdown on the legislation:
| Deductions | Senate Version | House Version |
|---|---|---|
| Capital Gains Exclusion | Owner must have lived in the property for 5 of the last 8 years | Same |
| Property Taxes | Deduction limited to $10,000 | Same |
| Mortgage Interest | Deductions on loans up to $1-million | Deductions on loans up to $500,000 |
| State & Local Taxes | Not deductible | Same |
| Second Home Mortgages | Not deductible | Same |
| Moving Expenses | Not deductible | Same |
| Home Equity Line of Credit | Not deductible | Same |
| Interest on Student Loans | Not deductible | Same |
The next step is for both sides to come to an agreement on a final bill. And then that bill needs to be voted on. It’s not too late to make your voice heard. Let your congress member know what you’re thinking! Click here for an easy way to contact them.
Last Wednesday was the hottest day of the century in DC.
Okay, that might not be true, but it sure seemed that way. My AC stopped working in the afternoon, when the outside temperature read in the 90s. By the time the realization set in that it was indeed just luke warm wind coming out of the vents and that reprogramming and restarting the system wouldn’t change that fact, it was after hours. Of course.
By nightfall, we had about a million degrees in the upstairs bedrooms. Opening the windows added insult to injury because the humidity must have been close to 100 percent.
Our CAC is less than two years old and overall quite fancy; it shouldn’t have just failed on us.
Diego, the lovely tech who showed up on Thursday–after the weather had suddenly turned dry and cool–took about two seconds to diagnose the problem. The “capacitator,” a 10-dollar part that kickstarts the compressor, had blown out. Who would have known. But it’s a very common thing to happen, Diego assured me. (If you’re either very handy or willing to risk your life, you can even learn how to fix this yourself.) And of course, it always happens when you need it the least, because that’s when those air conditioner parts tend to overheat.
Truth be told, I felt grateful that it wasn’t one of those third-world power outages this time. Miserable or not, we still had ice and fans to work with! (For a really nifty list with 24 suggestions on how to survive such nights, check out the Greatist here.)
It’s getting harder to surprise us. We’re getting to see a lot of houses each week, and much of what we see repeats itself. Design trends, fashionable features, architectural styles. We can date the kitchen cabinets after just a glance, and we can tell you in what decade those kinds of windows were used. It doesn’t help that the DC market and home owners have been incredibly traditional in their choices. (Yes, we do have some eccentric outliers, but let’s leave those out for now.)
So, it’s always fun to discover something that’s whimsical but not weird, that’s economical and not too hard to replicate. Painted floors as a design feature have not been widely used in the past hundred years, but they can be a really great idea. I took these pictures in a couple of houses that were recently for sale. It might not show too well in the photos, but in each of these cases, the paint made a huge difference in cleaning and cheering the place up.
In fact, we’re often asked by our sellers about their floors – brittle old linoleum in the laundry room, cracks and oil stains in the garage floor, stairs covered in un-revivable carpet, or even the bare floor in an attic playroom that was originally only intended for storage. The owners have long gotten used to overlooking the sore spot. When getting the house ready for the market and trying to look at it with the eyes of potential buyers, they suddenly find it embarrassing.
If you want to paint a floor, why not turning it into an opportunity? It’s certainly a way to make the house look pretty on a budget. whether time- or money-wise. Companies such as StencilEase.com or Cutting Edge Stencils
And you don’t even have to wait — you can reap the benefits of your beautification while you’re still in the house. If the fix was inexpensive enough, you can always repeat it later on. You might surprise yourself (and us!) with some great new ideas.
I had thought my problem was ants. Tiny little ants that gradually invaded my house for the past couple of months and formed into armies two weeks ago, after the dreadful Pepco mega outage. There were dozens of them on even the tiniest morsel of food left on the kitchen floor, and seemingly hundreds of them started attacking the cat food bowl even while the kitty was still eating from it. Yuck.
Well, the guy that was sent by my favorite pest control company showed up this morning and set out to explore the perimeter of my house for ant hills (or nests, as he called them).
No nests could be sighted. What he found instead, was every creepy thingy, pest and vermin imaginable. There were a couple of carpenter bee holes in the fence, paper wasp nests under a seat on the deck, large spider nests outside the garage and lady bugs that might live in the walls. The worst, however, was a football-sized nest of bald-faced hornets right above my kitchen door. The entrance to the hive-like thing was crawling with huge inch-long wasps. “And these are really nasty ones,” the exterminator explained. “They will attack you massively if you just stare at them.”
How could I have missed this all??!! Perhaps it’s the weather — it’s been so brutally hot that we haven’t spent too much time outside. (Note to self: never again judge home sellers who might have missed a little infestation here or there…)
Another two hours and multiple treatment measures later (I pitied the guy who came to bait ants and ended up having to climb around my house in a beekeeper’s suit, in 100 F heat), the tiny ants on the kitchen counter looked, well, sweet and harmless.
If you own a home in the DC area, here’s my advice for you: grab a pair of binoculars or even just your sunglasses when you come home today, and then go around the house to check if nature might be trying to take over your place as well.
