New Listing - 2610 Watson Street, Sacramento, CA 95821

Del Paso Manor 2-3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1276sf cutie! You will love the bright floorplan that spills natural light throughout. The living room features a huge bank of sunny windows overlooking the front porch and front yard. A formal dining room leads to the updated kitchen, which offers lots of storage and counter space and overlooks the HUGE backyard. Two spacious hallway bedrooms, each with ample closet space! Large bonus room makes for a fabulous home office or 3rd bedroom. The backyard has an expansive covered composite deck, perfect for entertaining, and lots of sunny space to garden or play. Large side yard for all your toys or recreation vehicles. Storage shed. All this with wood floors, dual pane windows, plantation shutters, crown moulding, composition roof, and central heat and air conditioning. And can you say location location location? This adorable home is in an ideal spot just a hop skip and a jump from Dutch Brothers, restaurants, shopping, parks, schools, and more! Don't wait! Offered at 399,900. For more photos, details, and a 3D virtual tour, please visit 2610 Watson Street, Sacramento, CA 95821.

New Listing - 2412 Watson Street, Sacramento, CA 95864

Del Paso Manor 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 850sf cutie! This adorable and affordable home is the perfect blank canvas for your personal touches. You will love the bright floorplan that spills natural light throughout. The living room features a huge bank of sunny windows overlooking the front porch and front yard. The kitchen offers lots of storage and counter space and overlooks the HUGE backyard. Two spacious bedrooms, each with ample closet space and cool wood lap walls! Attached garage with extra storage cabinets. Dual pane windows. Composition roof. Central heat and air conditioning. And can you say location location location? This adorable home is in an ideal spot just a hop skip and a jump from Dutch Brothers Coffee, restaurants, shopping, parks, schools, and more! Don't wait! Offered at $369,900. For more photos, detail, and a 3D virtual tour please visit 2412 Watson Street, Sacramento, CA 95864.

Check Before You Burn in Sacramento -- from November to February!

Check Before You Burn: it's that time of year again...my husband and I love to have fires in our backyard fire pit this time of year. And as per usual between November and February, in Sacramento, I had to check the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District website - luckily it was ok to burn the evening we wanted to roast marshmallows.

Sacramento County residents and businesses are restricted -- or potentially prohibited -- from using indoor or outdoor fireplaces, wood stoves, firepits and chimineas that burn wood, pellets, manufactured logs or any other solid fuel, when the "fine particle pollution" is forecast to be elevated. And if you burn on a "no burn day" there are penalties. If you see someone burning a fire on a day where burning is restricted, you can file a complaint here. First time violators face a $50 fine or an option to complete and pass a wood smoke awareness course. Fines for subsequent violations are higher. Or if a fireplace is your home's only heat source, you can apply for a waiver. That waiver document is here.

Call 1-877-NOBURN-5 (1-877-662-8765) to get the daily burn status, check online, or you can subscribe to a daily "Air Alert" as I have, where the air forecast is emailed to you.

Do I personally think it is a good time to buy property in Sacramento? Yes, and my husband and I just bought another property...

The million dollar question during just about type of real estate market seems to be "is now a good time to buy a home in Sacramento?" I feel there is no good blanket answer for this question since everyone has different motivations to purchase a home, comprised usually of some combination of personal and financial factors. But generally, yes I do think it is still an opportune time in Sacramento to purchase property. And last week my husband and I closed escrow on another property and we could not be more thrilled about it.

We purchased a cute fixer single family property in the Del Paso Manor neighborhood and will embark on a little renovation project over the coming weeks to restore the home to its former glory. 

Why I hire a professional photographer for my listings...

Recently I was with a professional photographer at one of my listings as we were readying it to hit the market, and just for fun I decided to take a couple photos of the house myself just to compare to the professional pics side-by-side. There's no comparison: my photographs are lame. The lighting is inconsistent, there is this bleary quality around the windows, the composition is not ideal, and the rooms totally look small.

The professional photographers I hire to shoot my listings are amazing. It is SO critically important in marketing a home to have amazing photos -- we want a buyer to emotionally connect with a home before they ever set foot inside. Good photos generate excitement, and excitement generates lots of showings, and lots of showings generates offers.

New Listing - 2826 Alamitos Way, Sacramento (Arden), CA 95821

Adorable 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1,209sf home in Del Paso Manor / Arden! You will love the tree-lined street, updated kitchen, large living room with huge window overlooking the spacious park-like backyard, wood flooring throughout, central heat and air, and 1-car attached garage. Offered at $245,000 subject to lender approval of short sale. For more photos and detail please visit 2826 Alamitos Way, Sacramento, CA 95821.

My personal experience with using home warranty coverage to make a major claim on my central heating and air system...

I have always been an advocate of home warranties, and I thought I would share my own personal experience dealing with a major repair claim that I had on my own home recently. The short version of the story is the experience was extremely unpleasant. Here is the long version:

So first off, some of you may be wondering: just what is a home warranty? Well, unlike homeowner's insurance, a home warranty policy can be purchased to cover the repair of items in the home that break and need to be fixed. So for example, coverage may include things like fixing a leaking shower valve, fixing or replacing a broken dishwasher, fixing or replacing a water heater, etc. Coverage from plan to plan can vary to include a lot or a little, and there is usually a small service call fee of $60 when a contractor visits the house.

So in my case, when my husband and I purchased our current home in June 2014, we negotiated in our purchase that the seller pay for a 1-year home warranty policy for us. During our first year of ownership, we used the plan to repair a leak under our kitchen sink, to snake a backed-up shower drain, and make a repair to our air conditioning unit when the blower motor stopped working. Generally those repairs went pretty smoothly: we placed a claim with our warranty company, within a day a contractor called to schedule a time to visit the house, and within a couple days of that the repair was complete.

After a year of owning the home, in June 2015 we paid to extend the plan for another year, primarily because our HVAC unit was really old and we figured we would continue to have repair issues with it. This brings us to current day...

In early December, we re-roofed our home. The job started on December 9th, and the roofing contractor had to temporarily disconnect our HVAC unit, which sits on our roof. When they reconnected the unit after the job was complete on December 11th, they could not get it to turn on. So....

On Saturday December 12th, we made a claim with the home warranty company. It was immediately assigned to HVAC Contractor A (not going to disparage anyone). Then for some odd reason, the next day on December 13th we were notified by email it was re-assigned to another contractor, HVAC Company B. HVAC Company B called the next afternoon (a Monday) and the soonest both the contractor and I were available was Thursday, December 17th. Ugh, I guess a few more days without heat is manageable. We had already gotten out a couple electric blankets and a space heater, had a fire in the fireplace. So inconvenient yes, the end of the world, no.

HVAC Contractor B came out as scheduled on the 17th and diagnosed we had a cracked heat exchanger. Our unit was toast! It was not a repairable item, especially for a really old unit. He said the entire HVAC unit on our roof needed to be replaced. Unfortunately he was a one-person operation and said the job to replace this unit was beyond his capabilities. He called into the warranty company that afternoon, reported our unit needed to be replaced, and said a new contractor needed to be assigned for the replacement.

So that evening we were notified by email that HVAC Contractor C was assigned to our file. Ok...I guess a few more nights huddled with electric blankets and space heaters wouldn't kill us. The next day the newly assigned contractor contacted us and asked to come out on Sunday, December 20th. And he did. The technician spent less than 5 minutes at my house, didn't even get on the roof to look, didn't look at our ductwork...said he had enough information to bid the job. Umm, ok? He said he would call in the bid to the warranty company.

On Tuesday, December 22, I had not heard anything from the contractor or warranty company and was getting a little concerned. We were approaching 2 weeks with no heat and it was the week of Christmas. I called the warranty company, and the rep there told me they were waiting on information from HVAC Contractor C. I called the contractor and they said they had sent everything over. I asked them to again. I called the warranty company the next day on the 23rd, and again they said they did not have what they needed. I left a voicemail for the contractor asking them to send it in. Then over the next few days we heard nothing...granted it was Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and then the weekend. We enjoyed the holidays with our family and tried not to think about how cold our home was.

On December 26th I left another voicemail for HVAC Contractor C. The warranty company's call center was closed. I escalated the situation by contacting a local representative of an affiliated title company. She tried to help but really could not do too much except give me a direct phone number for a supervisor at the call center. So I called again on December 27th. Let's say by this point I was pretty irritated. I got a warranty company supervisor on the phone. She then informed me that HVAC Contractor C had refused the job. WHAT!? I was irate. This process was taking a ridiculous amount of time. Until that point I had not mentioned I am a Realtor and referred clients to this company pretty frequently, but I let her know that and how awful and frustrating this experience had been for my family.

The morning of Monday, December 27th I called the warranty company again. The rep I spoke to told me another contractor, HVAC Contractor D had been assigned. I never received email notification of that...she gave me their contact information and I called the company immediately. To that company's credit, they were able to send someone out to look at the job within a few hours. Progress!! The technician arrived, spent probably 30 minutes getting up on the roof, taking measurements, etc. Much better. That afternoon I heard from the contractor that the complete replacement had been approved by the warranty company. YAY! There would be some parts of the project not covered by the warranty -- the warrant company would pay up to $250 of the permit, up to $1000 for new ductwork, and would not cover the $400 testing of the ductwork for energy efficiency...but everything else would be covered. It was about a $10,000 total project, so paying a small fraction of that was ok by us.

BUT...then another set-back. Instead of being able to start the job right away, the warranty company had to ship a new HVAC unit to the contractor. Huh? So they could not just go down to a local supplier and get a unit and install it...no they had to wait. It took another week to arrive.

On January 5th, HVAC Contractor D arrived and replaced all of our ductwork in the attic...and that day the HVAC unit arrived! YAY! But it was raining and since the unit had to be installed on the roof, we had to wait for a clear day. Ok, that's understandable. So on Thursday January 7th, the unit was finally installed. I came home that day to a warm house for the first time in a month. Hallelujah! But the drama doesn't end there.

Remember those uncovered costs?  The office manager from HVAC Company D called Friday asking for payment. Since the warranty company was covering part of the job and we were covering a small portion, I asked her to email me an itemized bill that showed exactly what the warranty company was paying and what we were paying. That email never came, and I arrived home on Friday evening to find a rep from the contractor standing in my driveway demanding payment. Luckily my husband and I arrived home at the same time because the guy was a little scary. He handed us a bill with three items on it: Permit $150, Ductwork $2,200, HERS Test $400.

The amount of the bill was more or less what we had expected, but the bill was not itemized as we had requested...AND, we had not been provided a copy of a permit, the work had not been inspected by Sacramento County and signed off, nor had the HERS testing happened. So the contractor was billing us in full for a job that was not yet complete. We had some unpleasant words with the guy in our driveway, and ultimately we wrote him a check for 10% of the job, and told him we would pay the rest once everything was indeed complete. We got a call over the weekend from the owner of HVAC Contractor D demanding payment again. We asked where the permit was, when the HERS test was scheduled, and when final inspection would take place. He claimed the permit was at their office, and it would be weeks before the HERS test and inspection. He then accusing us of never intending to pay them. Once we threatened to contact the Contractors State License Board for their behavior he backed off. That evening, Sunday the 10th, I checked online with Sacramento County -- they have an online permit look-up -- sure enough, no permit had been obtained for our job.

So on Monday, the 11th, my husband spoke with the contractor again...and that morning they had obtained the permit and they scheduled the HERS test and final inspection for Wednesday January 13th. Hmm, I thought that would take weeks to get scheduled? My husband and I think that if we had indeed paid in full when the contractor demanded payment a few days prior, we probably never would have heard from them again, and no permit, no HERS test, and no final inspection that we would have already paid for. So unprofessional. What a joke.

So at 8am this morning, the HERS test was completed, and by 10am the Sacramento County building inspector arrived and signed off the permit.

I'm still waiting for an itemized bill, and after speaking with the contractor again earlier, it seems they have over-charged us $400 for an extra duct. They charged us for 8 ducts instead of the 7 we have. So tonight, assuming the contractor provides a corrected itemized bill, we will pay them in full for the remainder of the job.

So I know this was a long story...while saving $8,000 on our new HVAC system was definitely awesome, I think that folks should be prepared for a long, drawn out process, and be prepared to stay on top of both the home warranty company and the contractor assigned to the job.

Got a residential electric vehicle charger for my own house...pretty affordable and pretty awesome!

This is pretty cool. Nearly 2 years ago my husband and I got a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. He drives is primarily to work downtown and back, and mostly charges his car in the parking garage. A company called Chargepoint just came out with an affordable residential charging unit, so we took the plunge and had one installed in our home. This thing is awesome. The unit we purchased was the Chargepoint 25 32-Amp hard-wired model and cost about $500. They do make other less-expensive units as well...we purchased this one because it charges more quickly. We had an electrical contractor professionally install it for us. SMUD and PG&E both offer incentives to installing residential charging stations. We are loving this so far.

Road Closures due to USGA Senior Open Golf Tournament in Sacramento

The California Highway Patrol would like to remind everyone who plans to drive this week in Sacramento near Marconi Avenue near the Del Paso Country Club; the following information pertains to the road closures due to the USGA Senior Open:

MARCONI AVENUE: 4 lanes CLOSED from Lacy Lane to Watt Ave. One lane OPEN eastbound for “Resident Traffic Only”

MORSE AVENUE: CLOSED (Resident Traffic Only) from Pope Ave. to Marconi Ave.

POPE AVENUE: CLOSED (Resident Traffic Only) from Morse Ave. to Watt Ave.

**All residents affected directly will receive hanging tags to display in their vehicles in order to access streets around their homes.

Thinking about painting your home? Invest a few dollars in some sample paint first!

Now that the majority of the interior projects are complete on the house we bought this summer in Del Paso Manor, my husband and I painted the exterior of our home a couple weeks ago. And probably much like anyone else who decides to paint their home, we spent some time collecting paint chips from a few paint stores before narrowing down our selection.

We wanted to paint the body of our house blue, the roof eaves and trim white, and add some red accents. And we picked out some paint that we thought would look amazing on our home. Turns out we were wrong about it looking amazing. It looked amazingly awful, a la a circus tent.

If you are planning to paint your home, or even just a room, I'd highly suggest getting a few actual samples to actually paint on your home first, before you invest several hundred dollars in paint. Thankfully, we spent $10 and purchased a small sampling of the three colors we chose, and painted a section of the side and some trim near our front door. Because if we had purchased 20 gallons of what we had originally picked out, we would have ended up with "that house" on the street that our neighbors refer to as "that Southwest Airlines house."

Once we decided those were not the colors we wanted, we went back to the drawing board and got some more samples with a little more color variety. Ultimately we decided to paint our house a richer, darker blue, with a richer, darker maroon accent. Thankfully my husband was willing to get his hands dirty and take on the exterior painting project, so we rented the equipment...and he and I spent the better part of a couple weekends prepping, masking, and painting the house. There's still a little touching up to take care of, but overall we are happy with the results. I'm hoping that our next home improvement project isn't until after the new year...it's a lot of work!

Sacramento County Sheriff's Department volunteers will do "Vacation Checks" while you are out of town...

When you're on vacation or away from your home for an extended period of time, would it give you peace of mind if someone was checking your house occasionally to make sure it is secure? I know I sure would love that at my house!

Do you live in the Sacramento County area? 

The Sacramento County Sheriff's Department and its "Volunteers in Partnership with the Sheriff" (VIPS) provide a free service to do "vacation checks" for Sacramento County area residents. They will visit the home while residents are away and perform periodic checks that the property is secure. You can find out more information about this program or sign up for this service at a local Sacramento Sheriff Service Center near you.

How to inexpensively update your 1950's bathroom...

As the home improvement party continues on the house my husband and I just bought, I thought I would share what we did to update our hall bathroom. Our Del Paso Manor home was built in 1955, and is pretty original. Our hallway bathroom had a newer vanity, however the walls and floors were bright pink tile, and the bathtub was powder blue. I'm sure in 1955 this was really awesome, but my teenage step-sons who will be primarily using this bathroom were not thrilled with the color scheme.

The existing tile and tub were in excellent shape, so instead of spending thousands of dollars demolishing and remodeling the hall bathroom, we spent about $500 to apply an acrylic color coating over the tile. We chose all white -- however there are other colors to choose from. It really cleaned up the appearance of the bathroom, and after adding a slightly contrasting wall color, a patterned shower curtain, this bathroom looks much improved! We hired a contractor to do this for us, however home improvement stores sell do-it-yourself kits for less than what we spent. We may decide to remodel this more extensively in the future, but this definitely looks great for now.

Yes, I can confirm for you that buying a home is indeed exciting!

I wrote a few months ago about my very first home buying experience in 1998. Well it's been an exciting couple of months as my husband and I have been working on another purchase; our first home together! We just closed escrow this last week on a home in Del Paso Manor. Our one year wedding anniversary is coming up on July 6th. This was a nice gift to each other.

It's been a while since I was my own client, and I have to say, it's a mixed bag of stress and excitement. I'm glad it's over so now we can start the fun part -- remodeling! We bought a house that is in its original 1955 condition, complete with bright pink and blue tiled bathrooms...so it will be fun to see the transformation over the next month as we do some repairs and renovation before we move in.