Major kitchen remodels are among the most popular home improvements, but a revamped cooking and gathering space can set you back a pretty penny. According to the “2015 Remodeling Impact Report” from the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®, a complete renovation of a 210-square-foot kitchen has a national median cost of $60,000, and you’ll recover 67% of that cost come selling time.

Despite the big price tag, you’ll be glad you upgraded. In fact, homeowners polled for the “Report” gave their kitchen redo a Joy Score of 9.8 — a rating based on those who said they were happy or satisfied with their remodeling, with 10 being the highest rating and 1 the lowest.

If you can’t afford the entire remodel all at once, complete the work in these five budget-saving stages.

Stage One: Start with a Complete Design Plan

Your plan should be comprehensive and detailed — everything from the location of the refrigerator to which direction the cabinet doors will open to whether you need a spice drawer.

To save time (and money) during tear-out and construction, plan on using your existing walls and kitchen configuration. That’ll keep plumbing and electrical systems mostly intact, and you won’t have the added expense — and mess — of tearing out walls.

You may want to consider hiring a professional designer, such as an architect or a certified kitchen designer, who can make sure the details of your plans are complete. You’ll pay about 10% of the total project for a pro designer, but you’ll save a whole bunch of headaches that would likely cost as much — or more — to fix. Plus, a pro is likely to offer smart solutions you hadn’t thought of.

For a nominal fee, you also can get design help from a major home improvement store. However, you’ll be expected to purchase some of your cabinets and appliances from that store.

• Cost: professional designer: $5,800 (10% of total)

• Key strategies: Once your plans are set, you can hold onto them until you’re ready to remodel.

• Time frame: 3 to 6 months

Stage Two: Order the Cabinets, Appliances, and Lighting Fixtures

Cabinets and appliances are the biggest investments in your kitchen remodeling project. If you’re remodeling in stages, you can order them any time after the plans are complete and store them in a garage (away from moisture) or in a spare room until you’re ready to pull the trigger on the installation.

Remember that it may take four to six weeks from the day you order them for your cabinets to be delivered.

If you can’t afford all new appliances, keep your old ones for now — but plan to buy either the same sizes, or choose larger sizes and design your cabinets around those larger measurements. You can replace appliances as budget permits later on.

The same goes for your lighting fixtures: If you can live with your old ones for now, you’ll save money by reusing them.

You’ll have to decide about flooring, too — one of the trickier decisions to make because it also affects how and when you install cabinets.

You’ll need to know if your old flooring runs underneath your cabinets, or if the flooring butts up against the cabinet sides and toe kicks. If the flooring runs underneath, you’ll have some leeway for new cabinet configurations — just be sure the old flooring will cover any newly exposed floor areas. Here are points to remember:

• Keep old flooring for cost savings. This works if your new cabinets match your old layout, so that the new cabinets fit exactly into the old flooring configuration. If the existing flooring runs underneath your cabinets and covers all flooring area, then any new cabinet configuration will be fine.

• Keep your old flooring for now and cover it or replace it later. Again, this works if your cabinet configuration is identical to the old layout.

However, if you plan to cover your old flooring or tear it out and replace it at some point in the future, remember that your new flooring might raise the height of your floor, effectively lowering your cabinet height.

For thin new floor coverings, such as vinyl and linoleum, the change is imperceptible. For thicker floorings, such as wood and tile, you might want to take into account the change in floor height by installing your new cabinets on shims.

• Cost: cabinets: $16,000 (27% of total); appliances and lighting fixtures: $8,500 (15% of total); vinyl flooring: $1,000 (2% of total)

• Key strategy: Keep old appliances, lighting fixtures, and flooring and use them until you can afford new ones.

• Time frame: 2 to 3 weeks

Stage Three: Gut the Kitchen and Do the Electrical and Plumbing Work

Here’s where the remodel gets messy. Old cabinetry and appliances are removed, and walls may have to be opened up for new electrical circuits. Keep in close contact with your contractor during this stage so you can answer questions and clear up any problems quickly. A major kitchen remodel can take six to 10 weeks, depending on how extensive the project is.

During this stage, haul your refrigerator, microwave, and toaster oven to another room — near the laundry or the garage, for example — so you’ve got the means to cook meals. Feinberg suggests tackling this stage in the summer, when you can easily grill and eat outside. That’ll reduce the temptation to eat at restaurants, and will help keep your day-to-day costs under control.

• Cost: $14,500 for tear-out and installation of new plumbing and electrical (25% of total)

• Key strategies: Encourage your contractor to expedite the tear-out and installation of new systems. Plan a makeshift kitchen while the work is progressing. Schedule this work for summer when you can grill and eat outside.

• Time frame: 6 to 10 weeks

Stage Four: Install Cabinets, Countertops, Appliances, Flooring, and Fixtures

If you’ve done your homework and bought key components in advance, you should roll through this phase. You’ve now got a (mostly) finished kitchen.

A high-end countertop and backsplash can be a sizable sum of money. If you can’t quite swing it, put down a temporary top, such as painted marine plywood or inexpensivelaminate. Later, you can upgrade to granite, tile, solid surface, or marble.

• Cost: $12,000 (21% of total)

• Key strategy: Install an inexpensive countertop; upgrade when you’re able.

• Time frame: 1 to 2 weeks

Final Phases: Upgrade if Necessary

Replace the inexpensive countertop, pull up the laminate flooring, and put in tile or hardwood, or buy that new refrigerator you wanted but couldn’t afford during the remodel. (Just make sure it fits in the space!)

Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News

Children who were on the nice list this year may have unwrapped smartphones as holiday gifts. But parents may be wary of the naughty things that children can do with the devices — and with good reason.  Kids are becoming more and more tech savvy, which, in some cases, can get them into trouble.  The increasing popularity of vault apps is a prime example.  Vault apps are apps that masquerade as inconspicuous utility apps but are actually used for secret messaging or data storage.  Another culprit is “freemium” apps; these are usually games which are free to download but but come with their own mini stores to purchase additional content.  If your account is associated with your kid’s smartphone or tablet, you may start to see several small charges to your credit card.

You want your children (and wallet) to be safe, so what could you possibly do to ensure that they are?  Luckily, there are ways to restrict what your children can access on their devices; unfortunately, the extent to which you can restrict actually depends on whether you’re using Apple or Android devices.  As it turns out, Apple offers a multitude of options for parental controls on their devices.  Android, by contrast, is lagging in this regard.  

The heart of the iPhone’s parental controls is a feature called Family Sharing. Setting it up involves designating a parent’s iTunes account as the primary credit card holder. The parent can invite multiple Apple accounts to join the group, letting family members make purchases from the same credit card and share content purchases with one another. In other words, if you buy an app on one phone, other members of the family can also use that app without having to pay for it again.

Setting up Family Sharing on your multiple Apple devices requires only a short amount of time commitment, but from then on, it’s smooth sailing.

A key part of Family Sharing is a feature called Ask to Buy. With the feature enabled, whenever a child tries to download an app or make a purchase inside an app, the parent’s iPhone receives a notification and a detailed description of the content. The parent can then choose to allow or deny the purchase.  The feature should come in handy for parents who don’t want their children to rack up hefty credit card bills with in-app purchases. It should also help parents who are concerned about so-called vault apps and want to vet the apps their children are downloading.

Inside the iPhone’s settings app, there is also a setting called Restrictions. It’s basically a switchboard full of features you can enable or disable on an iPhone. On a child’s iPhone, you can restrict the Safari browser from loading websites with adult content. For parents who occasionally hand over their own phone to a child to play a game, you can create a restriction on your phone that disables the ability to delete apps to minimize the risk of losing important content.

Another common headache for parents: Children who unwittingly burn through the data on a phone plan by constantly streaming video or music over a cellular connection. In the iPhone’s settings, you can disable apps like Netflix or Apple Music from using cellular content. Then in the iPhone’s restriction settings, you can block the ability to re-enable cellular data use for those apps.

The Android system, on the other hand, could only accomplish a few family-related tasks, and in imperfect ways: It could restrict children from downloading apps and other content at certain maturity levels, and it also was able to partly prevent a child from downloading in-app content by requiring authentication, like a password, for making purchases.

Android lacks features for blocking adult content inside web browsers or vetting vault apps. There are some limited solutions: Google’s search engine can be set up with a feature called SafeSearch to prevent web searches for adult content. Some apps, like YouTube, can also be configured to filter out inappropriate content.

Similarly, the system also lacks the ability to disable cellular data use for certain apps, though one restriction in YouTube lets you stream high-definition video only over a Wi-Fi connection. Still, that won’t do much to prevent a child from using all your cell data.

Android users can also download third-party apps to help prevent certain activities. The app AppLock, for instance, can be used to lock down any app that a parent suspects to be a vault app with a PIN code. Another piece of software called PhoneSheriff can be used to monitor and block activities on multiple cellphones; it costs a hefty $90.

Over all, the lack of built-in restrictions for Android suggested that parental controls are an afterthought for Google.

The most likely reason Google lagged Apple on parental controls is because of the open-source nature of Android. Google lets device manufacturers install Android on their phones and customize the system to their liking, like adding their own parental control settings.

Though Apple’s childproofing solutions are thorough, technology alone cannot solve all our problems. In addition to using phone restrictions, it would be wise for parents to have a conversation with their children about what is right and wrong, and to help them earn privileges to different features when they prove they understand.  Children are going to need to be able to independently manage their own time and make the right choices, and constantly being the Internet police may not be very conducive.

Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News

What is the one thing that takes the longest to do and is the most frustrating part of putting up the Christmas tree?  The lights!  Christmas lights have a knack for getting tangled up into knots, which is a large reason why so many artificial trees now come pre-lit – untangling and stringing lights just isn’t a lot of fun.  This year when you put your tree away try one of these methods for keeping your lights tangle free for next year:

1. Cardboard- Recycle some of the cardboard that you received with gifts or from boxes in the mail for this do it yourself light storage project.  Cut some heavy pieces of cardboard into a rectangle that is about 12 inches by 6 inches.  Just guestimate, it doesn’t need to be exact.  Take a pair of heavy duty scissors and cut a notch on one side so you can hook one end of the lights into the notch.  Then start wrapping the lights around the cardboard.  When you are done wrapping you can check to see where the end of your cord is and then cut another notch along the side to attach the end of the cord.  Recycle some tissue paper that you received over Christmas to turn into the padding that you need between the layers of lights.  This way the lights will stay tangle free and not get broken.
2. Use a power cord holder- There are many different cord holders on the market, but you will want to look for the ones that are for the big outdoor electrical cords.  Wind the lights up on the cord holder so that you can hang them on hooks on the wall in the garage instead of throwing them into boxes.  If the cord holder is big enough, just keep plugging the lights into each other and keep winding.  Now most or all of your lights are all in one place safe and sound for next year.
3. Wire zip ties- Your answer to keeping lights tangle free might be wire zip ties.  These zip ties are inexpensive, so it won’t matter if you need new ones every year.  Wrap the light string around the palm of your hand and your elbow to put the lights into a circle.  Take the zip ties and secure the lights in 3 places.  The lights won’t get tangled up and you have very little invested very little time or money.  Place each string into a recycled grocery sack to keep the bulbs from banging into each other.
4. Zip top bags- Plug the male end of the cord into the female end of the same cord and loosely place the light string into a quart or gallon sized zip top bag.  The string won’t become tangled and it will stay clean because it’s zipped up tight.  The bag will protect the bulbs from banging against other strings as well.
5. Pringles can- Recycle some chip cans for your light storage.  Cut a hole in the top for one end of the cord and then snap the lid onto the can.  Wrap the light string around the chip can going all the way to the bottom and then back up to the top.  Work it so the end of the cord can be stuck into the lid as well.  Now the lights will be tangle free and you can stand up the storage in another box or container.  If you are worried about the bulbs crashing into each other in the box you can lightly wrap tissue paper around the wound up lights before you set them in the storage bin.

Spending a few extra minutes this year putting away your lights with one of these tangle free ideas will save you time and frustration next year.  Keep your eyes open to other objects you could also recycle for light string storage.  Consider using an oatmeal box or a wrapping paper tube.  Nothing is off limits when you use your imagination.

Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News

Originally posted at: Lafayette Real Estate News