Make a maintenance plan to keep your home in tip-top shape while saving you money. The newer your home is, the less maintenance there will be, but in time, you will need to fix, replace, and renew some aspects of the interior and exterior of your home as it ages. Home maintenance involves everything from the basic foundation to small appliances and hardware fixtures. Where do you begin? It’s best to start by breaking up your care into three main tasks: Inspection, Cleaning, and Repair/Replacement. Here are some essential tips for new homeowners that fall under each job that you can accomplish yourself with ease and without paying a contractor.

Test and Inspect

Evaluate the condition of all major structural and functional items such as the roof, shingles, gutters, windows, plumbing hardware, water heater, HVAC System, and other major appliances that help sustain living. Look for missing parts, cracks, leaks, mold, and further damage that could lead to wood rot and pest infestations. If your energy bills are high, you may lose costly heat due to poor sealing and insulation. Check caulking on the outside of your windows for cracks that could be allowing a draft in. Test your refrigerator door seals to ensure that the cold is staying in. Close the door on a sheet of paper, and if you can’t remove it from the closed door, your seal is good. Having moisture or flood issues? Check for disconnected or faulty downspouts and test your sump pump levels twice yearly to ensure it’s not overflowing. Track energy consumption by checking your water bill.

Repair and Replacement

Once you have completed your inspections, you will know what needs to be fixed or replaced. If you are unsure what parts are required, consult the appliance manufacturer or contractor or retrieve any instructions for proper care that you may have saved. Always keep a toolbox well-stocked with screws, nuts, bolts, nails, trusty power tools, and other hardware for quick fixes when all else fails. Items needing attention are faulty shutoff valves, loose showerheads, malfunctioning smoke detectors, squeaky door hinges and floorboards, loose wallpaper, leaky faucets, clogged or running toilets, and misaligned drawers and blinds. Purchase a spray lubricant to unstick jammed windows, replacement washers to fix a valve, or expanding foam to secure a wobbly pipe.

Cleaning and Renewing

Repairs may be infrequent, but there is always something in and out of your

While certain home maintenance tasks require a professional, the homeowner can handle many with the right tools and proper attention to care. If you can afford to hire a handyman to complete a task, that is your choice. But it’s also great to save some money and become more knowledgeable about basic homecare skills to become a more self-sufficient and frugal homeowner.

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Robin McCoy is a Texas Realtor with Keller Williams Realty. License #0582766
RobinMcCoyRealty.com | 214.226.3770 | RobinMcCoy@kw.com

The information contained, and the opinions expressed, in this article are not intended to be construed as investment advice. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information or opinions contained herein. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice. You should always conduct your own research and due diligence and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on the information or opinions contained herein.

Climb, Plant, Climb!

Growing a garden is the ultimate act of faith. After all, you never know if your plants will thrive or if they will cease to be long before reaching their full potential. Hopefully, with diligent care, and a little luck, your plants will grow big, strong, and glorious. When it comes to trellising, two of the most important parts of their success are having the right kinds of things to climb and the right help to get started on their way up.

What Is a Climbing Plant?

The term “climbing plant” is kind of a giant catch-all term that includes a range of plants with long, flexible stems, and some mechanism that allows them to reach great heights in their native environments. However, some climbing plants will also just become shrubs if they have nothing to climb, and others will climb for a while, then set roots where they land before shedding their climbing tools all together.

But in most cases, when people think of climbing plants, they think of plants that are vining. These plants climb over structures and other plants using several different mechanisms. This can include stems that twist around supports, leaves that twist around objects or one another, curly tendrils that wrap around supports, long roots that help them cling to solid surfaces, or hooks like thorns that help them move upward.

Although it’s common to see vines sold as ornamentals, there are also a number of climbing plants that are part of the vegetable garden. For example, cucumbers and tomatoes are both vining plants, which makes them perfect for vertical gardening.

Trellising Vining Plants

Climbing plants can be easy to grow, if you give them appropriate things to climb and help them get a foothold when needed. Trellising a plant isn’t difficult, but choosing the right trellis can be sometimes. Not every plant will respond to every trellis, so it’s very important to consider the method by which your plant climbs before choosing a trellis for it.

For example, if your plant climbs with tendrils, it will do best with a wire trellis with frequent horizontal cross pieces. Because it needs to be able to reach up and wrap the tendrils around something substantial but narrow, the thick, flat trellises can be difficult for this type of vine to climb. On the other hand, if you’re trying to grow something that uses its roots to climb, like Virginia creeper, you need those trellises with the wide, flat components. It’s very difficult for this kind of plant to climb up narrow trellis material because it has to have some significant space and texture to allow it to really grab on with its roots.

So, whether you choose your trellis first (maybe you already have one in mind) or you choose your plant first, they need to be compatible. For many climbing plants, something as simple as mesh fencing can make a magnificent trellis.

How to Train Your Vines

Training vines to their appropriate trellises is surprisingly simple most of the time. As long as your trellis is close enough to the ground that your vine can reach it quickly in its growing process, often all you have to do is wait and let the plant do its own thing. If your plant is a bit more resistant, that’s ok, there are ways to encourage it to grow up.

A common technique for training vines onto a trellis is simply to wait for it to grow long enough for you to start winding it through the trellis material. Be very gentle, as you’ll need those delicate growing tips to remain undamaged, but loosely weaving it through the trellis as it grows will help it establish a framework for where it should be hanging out, so to speak.

With vines that need to attach to flat areas using their roots, you may be able to tie them on loosely until the root has firmly secured the plant. Use a cloth tie if at all possible to reduce the risk of damage to your plant. Before you know it, you’ll be able to untie the plant and let it get on with growing.

Still Need Help Moving Your Plants Up?

If your vining plants are still giving you trouble, or you simply don’t know which vine is right for your really magnificent arbor, it may be time to consult a landscaper or other plant expert.

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Robin McCoy is a Texas Realtor with Keller Williams Realty. License #0582766
RobinMcCoyRealty.com | 214.226.3770 | RobinMcCoy@kw.com

The information contained, and the opinions expressed, in this article are not intended to be construed as investment advice. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information or opinions contained herein. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice. You should always conduct your own research and due diligence and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on the information or opinions contained herein.

Buying a home can be full of difficult decisions, and as housing prices climb, maybe even more difficult financial planning. For people looking for a different way to help pay for their mortgage every month, buying a home with an attached rental unit might just provide the monthly bump that makes that payment a little easier to accomplish.

What Is an Attached Rental Unit?

An attached rental unit, formally called an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU), is typically a smaller living space adjacent to a main home. It might be a tiny house in the backyard, or something more like self-contained mother-in-law quarters attached to the house. It can even be a small apartment over the garage. There aren’t a lot of rules about what an ADU has to be, except that it should be fully autonomous.

The reason for autonomy is that this is what it takes to really have solid rental income potential from a secondary dwelling on a regular lot. Imagine if you were renting an apartment somewhere, you’d certainly want to have your own kitchen and bathroom, wouldn’t you? It’s difficult to rent units without these features, so typically, they’re part of any successful ADU.

Benefits to Having an ADU

Having a rental can be a lot of work, but there are also a lot of benefits to having an ADU on your lot. Not only does the rent from an ADU help pay the mortgage every month, it can also act as flexible space for whatever life might throw at you down the way.

For example, when you first buy your home, maybe you really need help with the mortgage payment, so you use the ADU as a long-term rental unit with a tenant who has signed a year-long lease. This tenant not only pays the utilities for that unit, but they also help out with the mortgage by paying rent. It’s a great situation while you’re trying to pay down your mortgage and ramp up your income.

As time goes by, you might get tired of dealing with a long-term tenant, but you can still use that unit for short-term tenancy, if allowed by your neighborhood and city. Airbnb, for example, gives you the option to rent by the day or week, so you never have to stick with a tenant for too long. You can turn off being a landlord for a few weeks and go on vacation yourself without having to worry.

If Airbnb isn’t your thing, your ADU can still be used by your college-aged child or aging family member. Remember, these are essentially self-contained apartments, so they should provide a great deal of privacy and autonomy to anyone living inside. ADUs have long been favored by people with aging parents, hence the former popular nickname “mother-in-law quarters.”

Financing a Home With a Rental Unit

If you’re looking for a house with a rental unit, you may also wonder how you’re going to finance it. Do you need a special kind of loan or is this edging into the realm of commercial financing? Not at all. Most mortgages will allow you to purchase a property that has up to four units on it. That’s a lot to handle if you’ve never had a rental, but a single ADU is pretty easy upkeep.

All you need to do is choose a property that you like and ensure that it will pass any requirements from your lender (your Realtor can help with this). Certain programs may have specific inspections, such as FHA, VA, or USDA, so you definitely want to let your lender know that you’re looking for a property with an ADU before you commit to your loan.

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Robin McCoy is a Texas Realtor with Keller Williams Realty. License #0582766
RobinMcCoyRealty.com | 214.226.3770 | RobinMcCoy@kw.com

The information contained, and the opinions expressed, in this article are not intended to be construed as investment advice. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information or opinions contained herein. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice. You should always conduct your own research and due diligence and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on the information or opinions contained herein.

We all know the old song and dance: insulate and weatherproof your home to maximize your utility dollars. Filling all the gaps and keeping all the climate-controlled air where it should be is a huge part of creating a home that’s not only comfortable, but efficient. Or so we’ve been told. The truth is that there’s another step in the process that many homeowners are overlooking, and it’s both easy to install and inexpensive: a special kind of foil called radiant barriers.

What are Radiant Barriers?

Radiant barriers aren’t much to look at. In fact, they pretty much just look like really heavy foil like you’d use on your grill or on top of a casserole dish. But they make up for looks in performance. According to Energy.gov, a website produced by the US Department of Energy, radiant barriers can reduce cooling costs by up to 10% in sunny climates, and may even allow a homeowner to install a smaller air conditioning system, saving additional money over the longer term.

They work by reducing the radiant heat that comes into an attic or other space. When roofing materials get hot from sun exposure, that heat eventually transfers into the attic via radiation. So, to slow or even stop this process, a barrier that’s designed to reflect that radiant heat back out of the attic is necessary.

Many houses lack radiant barriers, either because it wasn’t invented when they were built and no one thought to add it later, or because the climate where they were built was once considerably cooler than it is now. That doesn’t mean you can’t add one, though.

Installing Radiant Barriers

Installing a radiant barrier is not a difficult process, but it can be a time-consuming and messy one. After all, you’ll need to be in your attic for prolonged periods, working with a sort of heavy foil material that can be cumbersome for a single person to manage. But it’s definitely possible as an advanced DIY project.

When you install a radiant barrier, it’s really important to not only pay attention to which side is up on the barrier material, so the proper side faces the roof, but that you install it in such a way that it won’t be contaminated with things like dust and other debris. The more dust and material that collects on a radiant barrier, the less effective it will be.

In the past, some people have installed radiant barriers on top of their insulation, but this has proven to be a poor way of installing the material. Instead of the wanted effect of cooling the attic, in these homes, the radiant barrier instead interferes with the insulation’s ability to work properly. Since they also tend to act as a moisture barrier, radiant barriers can also trap moisture inside attic insulation, causing all kinds of other problems.

When installing a radiant barrier, hanging it along the contours of the attic roof or rafters is your best bet, but you’ll need to let the material droop slightly between attachment points to create a 1-inch air gap between the material and the bottom of the roof. You can also choose insulation with a radiant barrier built-in, called reflective insulation, where the barrier acts as the facing material.

Safety With Radiant Barrier Materials

Because radiant barriers are made of metal foil, they will conduct electricity. Many homeowners don’t consider this when installing them and may overlook serious hazards like contact with bare wire or old wire with failing insulation. Electricity can cause serious injuries or damage to homes, especially if the contact is prolonged and widespread, like it would be when accidentally electrifying an entire attic’s worth of foil.

When to Call a Pro…

If you’re not sure you’re ready to install a radiant barrier yourself, or you’re concerned about getting it just right, it might be better to hire a professional to get the job done. 

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45 Easy Ways to Sell Your Home Faster

Robin McCoy is a Texas Realtor with Keller Williams Realty. License #0582766
RobinMcCoyRealty.com | 214.226.3770 | RobinMcCoy@kw.com

The information contained, and the opinions expressed, in this article are not intended to be construed as investment advice. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information or opinions contained herein. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice. You should always conduct your own research and due diligence and obtain professional advice before making any investment decision. Robin McCoy Realty Group and Living in DFW will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on the information or opinions contained herein.