You’ve purchased a home with a large backyard and all your pup wants to do is be outside. But after the 10th time, you have to get up and open the door to let him or her in and out, you start researching doggy doors. Long-term convenience with a fairly simple installation sounds great to you! However, before committing, you should consider how it may affect the safety of your home.
A doggy door is a home feature that can make your house more susceptible to burglary. These doors are almost always placed in a back door or wall of the home, putting it out of the line of sight for passing traffic and neighbors. If a robber is small enough, they may be able to slip right through the door or use it to reach in and unlock the door.
As long as you remain conscious and aware of the safety implications, there are several ways to secure your doggy door, keeping convenience in place while protecting you and your family. The first and easiest option is to select a door that includes a sliding bolt or has a self-locking feature. If you have a security system in place, you can have the design adjusted to include the doggy door and surrounding area. Many of these systems include sensors and cameras intelligent enough to ignore your pet’s body weight or shape, but pick up on anything else. Alternatively, you could install a motion detector that will signal you on your phone or report to your security company if someone is coming in and out of your home.
Regardless of the option you choose, make sure you take precautions to protect the safety of your family members, both human and furry.
Michelle Glass
Creating a gallery wall in your home is an easy, do-it-yourself way to bring your personal style into any room. There is no right or wrong way to create one and no limit to the possibilities. Before you get started, check out the following tips for creating an eye-catching gallery wall that you will love.
Creating a great gallery wall doesn’t require a huge area to work with. Select a nook or corner in your living room, a small stretch of hallway, or your entry area.
Find a favorite piece of art and use that as the centerpiece for your gallery wall. This could be a large canvas painting, family portrait, metal feature piece, or stylish mirror. Then choose pieces that complement and highlight it.
Is this gallery wall going to contain artwork and images of all the same texture, color, and materials? Or are you going to mix and match different prints, photographs, décor pieces, frames, and drawings?
Gallery walls usually lean one of two ways — linear and orderly or abstract and dimensional. Select the one that matches the look you’re going for and start hanging!
Your gallery wall doesn’t have to end where the wall hits the flooring. Consider tying in other aspects of the room by coordinating colors and materials on pieces, such as rugs, furniture, lamps, plants, bedding, decorative pillows, and more. Or, if you’ve already styled the rest of the room, use those colors to inspire the pieces in your gallery wall.
Michelle Glass
“Refinancing” is a scary word for many people, but that shouldn’t be the case for you. For many homeowners, refinancing can not only lower your monthly payments and help with your monthly budget, but it can save you thousands of dollars in the long run.
For years now, we’ve been hearing that interest rates will be on the rise, and although there have been some small increases, you’re still in a great position to drastically lower your interest rate. The general rule is if your mortgage interest rate is more than one percent above the current market rate, you should consider refinancing.
Don’t brush off refinancing just because it seems like a long and daunting process. An informational call with a lender to see how rates compare will only take a few minutes. There are also some programs for streamlining the application process. And besides, isn’t the amount of money you could save worth the time and effort?
Seeing your Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM) increase after the introductory period can be incredibly stressful and place a squeeze on your budget. Many people assume they’re stuck, but ARMs can be refinanced, just like fixed-rate mortgages. You can even switch to a shorter term fixed-rate mortgage, such as 15 or 23 years. The longer you’re planning to stay in the home, the more sense it makes to look into refinancing.
Michelle Glass
An evacuation plan is a necessity for every home, especially if you live in an area where fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding, and other disasters are a possibility. Many homeowners create evacuation plans for their homes and practice them with their kids, but far fewer have considered one for their pets. Take these steps to add your pets to your evacuation plan.
Everyone should know how to act during an evacuation, and that includes assigning one parent or adult to the pets. This allows the other parent and the children to focus on their part of the evacuation plan, so there’s no confusion during a high-stress moment when time is of the essence.
If you need to evacuate, you should know exactly where every important item is. If you pets require carriers, keep them in a place that you can access easily.
Include your pets in your home evacuation drills. It’ll help you see how they will respond and make changes to your plan if necessary. Getting your dog out of a window may not be as simple as you think!
No matter how much you drill your evacuation plan, it’s possible that a dog or cat will run off while you’re focusing on keeping your family safe. A microchip or a GPS-compatible tag can help you find your pets once it’s safe to return to the area.
Michelle Glass
Whether you work full-time at home or occasionally need to conduct business in the evenings or on the weekends, a home office a great way to utilize an extra room. A dedicated workspace in your home can be designed to increase productivity and comfort. Here are 5 ideas to get you started.
“Are you looking to upgrade to a larger space for your home office idea? Now is the time to Buy or Sell the home of your dreams!
Contact Michelle Glass today at 303-868-0011.
Michelle Glass
“What some inspiration on what your home office could look like? Check out this Pinterest Link to view beautiful home offices!”
Where will you work?
Denver Metro Area –
Hybrid – 30% in Office / 70% Field Work or Work from Home – Full Time
Must live in Denver Metro Area.
Keller Williams Office, Denver – Highland Neighborhood
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The Broker Assistant is the right hand and personal helper to the Senior Broker. This role will support one agent and will be working in a small business environment as a “Master of Systems”, consistently seeking new, innovative, and efficient business processes that save time and money. This person will manage the real estate transaction from “Under-Contract to Close.” They will work on all the operations of the business freeing the Senior Broker to focus more on generating transactions than closing them. This person will also work with a full-time virtual assistant to help them get projects completed.
The Broker Assistant is comfortable with marketing and prospecting for new business within our database and interacting with clients. As the success of the business grows, this individual has the potential to be promoted to Director of Operations, responsible for supporting more agents, department members and assistants to ensure all administrative tasks continue to be completed to high standards with maximum efficiency.
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While one of Colorado’s legislative chambers on Tuesday got its first long look at a bill that would allow local governments to implement rent control, a committee in the other chamber overwhelmingly backed a bill to build more workforce housing through public-private partnerships — a dichotomy around the affordable housing debate that may last all session.
Leaders of the Democratic-majority House and Senate said they did not believe that their members would have to choose the regulatory or partnership paths exclusively, arguing that the diversity in approaches to the housing crisis will create an all-encompassing conversation. But some, including Senate President Steve Fenberg, D-Boulder, also acknowledged that they did not know that the rent control bill will be able to survive the legislative process this year.
House Bill 1115, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Javier Mabrey of Denver and Elizabeth Velasco of Glenwood Springs, proposes repealing an existing state ban on cities and counties enacting laws that control rent on private residential property or private residential housing units. While simple in its wording, the bill could send shockwaves through the apartment and rental-housing sectors by limiting what landlords can charge tenants at a time when housing costs throughout Colorado have been skyrocketing but so have costs of building and maintaining housing.
Mabrey, an eviction defense attorney, said that as rent inflation has outpaced salary growth and made it hard for professionals like teachers or nurses to live in some parts of the Denver metro area, he wants to give local governments more tools to address cost-of-living issues. He argued that the policy is neither rent control nor rent stabilization in itself but rather an allowance for local governments to try new lines of attack, and he said he believes it could serve as a companion effort with the partner-focused Senate bill.
“I view this as an essential part of a broader package. When the governor talked in his State of the State Address about the need to build more, I see that as important too,” Mabrey said in an interview. “The rent stabilization could provide immediate relief, whereas the building bills could provide more relief in five to 10 years.”
Colorado state Sens. Dylan Roberts and Rachel Zenzinger present their bill on public-private partnerships in housing to a Senate committee on Tuesday.
The first effort aimed at boosting the inventory of available residences is Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Democratic Sens. Dylan Roberts of Avon and Rachel Zenzinger of Arvada, which passed the Senate Local Government and Housing Committee Tuesday on a bipartisan 6-1 vote.
That bill would enable the public-private partnership collaboration unit in the Colorado Department of Personnel and Administration to broker deals involving state property, working with developers and local governments to transfer, exchange or sell land that can be used for housing at about 55 sites statewide.
Karen Kellenberg, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Colorado, noted land costs have risen between 48% and 256% in areas her homebuilding nonprofit serves, and partnering with the state to reduce land costs could help to spur much more affordable housing, she said.
Several business groups also backed the bill because it allows the state and local governments to partner with the private sector to address a top need, saying that employers are having a hard time recruiting workers because there is no nearby attainable housing for them.
In many ways, SB 1 and HB 1115 could not be more different. One seeks to create partnerships between the government and private sector in which private-sector developers could still generate profits, while the other could allow local governments to cut into the revenue that companies can earn.
Cary Bruteig, founder of Apartment Insights, which puts out a quarterly report on the Front Range rental market, said HB 1115 would harm Denver’s rental market. It would remove the ability to raise rents to cover increased construction costs, and it would end the incentive to improve the condition of the apartments to obtain a higher rent.
“By imposing a rent limit, you remove the incentive to create new housing units … and you also remove the incentive for somebody to fix up their apartment,” Bruteig said. “So, you end up with really a lack of housing, run-down housing and incredibly full housing in markets with rent control.”
Drew Hamrick, general counsel and senior vice president of government affairs at the Apartment Association of Metro Denver, said there are several unintended consequences that could come from removing the state prohibition on rent control. People could choose to stay in rental units for longer to hold onto their current rates, which means housing opens less often for potential new residents, and towns and cities could see their rental prices skyrocket if a neighboring government caps their rents, he said.
Colorado House Majority Leader Monica Duran and Speaker Julie McCluskie discuss affordable-housing bills at a media briefing on Tuesday.
Top House and Senate leaders said they didn’t believe that the paths of public-private partnership and rent control were mutually exclusive so much as they were two different ways of attacking the same problem. While they questioned whether the rent-stabilization approach has enough support to make it through the Senate — the House sponsors have 20 co-sponsors, while Democratic Sen. Robert Rodriguez of Denver is the only Senate sponsor — they said it’s not an either/or decision.
Fenberg cast the two bills as seemingly affecting different markets — one focused on potential new built-to-own homes on underutilized public lands and the other on rental units in higher-cost cities. He said he hopes that any effort to roll back prohibitions on rent control could be tailored to not create a New York-style program of rent caps but to give more freedom to local governments to implement more subtle affordable housing policies that the law now bars.
“I don’t think most of these policies conflict,” Fenberg said. “I think it is a matter of priority and what we want to do.”
House Speaker Julie McCluskie, D-Dillon, added that she believes solutions to the housing affordability crisis will need to touch on multiple areas, including the construction of more homes, tenant/landlord relationships and homeowners’ association oversight. And the diversity of viewpoints that come from a record-large 46-person Democratic caucus in the 65-member House is needed to find a place of consensus — a sentiment shared by House Majority Leader Monica Duran, a Wheat Ridge Democrat who is a cosponsor of HB 1115.
“It may not end up exactly the way it was presented, but that comes from a collaboration of bringing everyone to the table,” said Duran of the rent-control bill. “And the fact that a single person or a family cannot afford rent is outrageous.”
You’ve most likely heard the rule: Save for a 20-percent down payment before you buy a home. The logic behind saving 20 percent is solid, as it shows that you have the financial discipline and stability to save for a long-term goal. It also helps you get favorable rates from lenders.
But there can actually be financial benefits to putting down a small down payment—as low as three percent—rather than parting with so much cash up front, even if you have the money available.
The downsides of a small down payment are pretty well known. You’ll have to pay Private Mortgage Insurance for years, and the lower your down payment, the more you’ll pay. You’ll also be offered a lesser loan amount than borrowers who have a 20-percent down payment, which will eliminate some homes from your search.
The national average for home appreciation is about five percent. The appreciation is independent from your home payment, so whether you put down 20 percent or three percent, the increase in equity is the same. If you’re looking at your home as an investment, putting down a smaller amount can lead to a higher return on investment, while also leaving more of your savings free for home repairs, upgrades, or other investment opportunities.
Of course, your home payment options aren’t binary. Most borrowers can find some common ground between the security of a traditional 20 percent and an investment-focused, small down payment. Your trusted real estate professional can provide some answers as you explore your financing options.