If you’re traveling to Venice, Italy, you want to go home with a special souvenir: a carnival mask, handmade paper, or a beautiful piece of Murano glass. But selecting what to buy can be an intimidating experience. How do you know if you’re buying something authentic, made locally and in a traditional way? How do you determine if you’ve fallen prey to one of the region’s many tourist traps?
Made in Venice is the companion to Laura Morelli’s Artisans of Venice. Put both books together and you’ll be among the most educated travelers in Italy!
There’s a reason home builders spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building and designing model homes for you to walk through. It’s hard not to be impressed. It’s like walking through the pages of a high-end home design magazine. You may think you are there to look at the floorplan, which says on the sign starts at $270,000, but you’re doing a whole lot more.
You can almost smell the delicious meals you’ll be able to prepare in the gourmet kitchen with the gas cooktop and double ovens. You’re falling for the engineered hardwood floors that stretch from the front door throughout the entire first floor. You’re imagining yourself in the luxurious bath with the tiled walls and floors and “comfort height” counter tops.
There are a lot of advantages to building a new home. Laura will always be happy to talk about the pros and cons of buying new versus buying an existing house, but here are some tips on what you need to know if you decide you want to buy a home with a production builder. That means builders who offer a set of floor plans, where you can select from a variety of choices. Pulte, Calatlantic (now Lennar), Fischer, Beazer, M/I, Drees and Arbor are all production builders. Building a production home is different than building a custom home, where we’d work together to find a lot and then work with an architect or builder to design the house from the ground up.
I know this sounds self-serving, but here’s the thing, the person who works at the sales office in the model home works for the builder. There are a lot of great sales people, but at the end of the day, their jobs are to sell you on a house, and they are working to get the builder the most money they can. You need someone to represent your best interests. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’ll pay more for the house if you’re working with a Realtor. Chances are good we can negotiate a better deal for you, plus I’ll be there throughout the whole process and work on your behalf.
Be assured the model home you are walking through has upgrades and a lot of them. This is the builder’s opportunity to show you lots of bells and whistles. If a neighborhood advertises that homes start in the low $300,000s, for example, chances are good, the model could be upward of $450,000 or even more. Whenever I walk through model homes with clients, I like to ask for the actual cost of the model and all the upgrades that were included, so we have a more realistic picture. Some upgrades most buyers don’t realize:
Lights - Unless you like to live in the dark and don’t care about resale value, you’ll need to upgrade lights. Most builders will include a couple of lights in the kitchen, the entry, the dining room and great room, but if you want lights so you actually can see to cook, and lights over your fancy island (be sure to ask whether the island is included, as it may be an option, too), you’ll need a light package. Also, typically bedrooms don’t come with overhead lights.
Refrigerators - I’ve never been in a model home that didn’t have a refrigerator, but these are not included. Typically, the only thing included in the base price is an oven, a vent over the oven and a dishwasher. You’ll have to upgrade to get the microwave over the stove, a cook top, double ovens or stainless steel.
Flooring - Of course, flooring is included. But this varies widely by builder and neighborhood. The standard typically is vinyl flooring in the hallway, kitchen, bathrooms and laundry. Carpet is everywhere else, so if you want the hardwood floors you saw in the model, it’s going to add upward of $10,000 depending on the size of the house.
You’re probably thinking: Wait, I thought the lot was included in the price of the house. Well, not really. Builders charge a “premium” for lots, and most neighborhoods have lot premiums on nearly every lot in the neighborhood. The premium is based on how desirable the lot is. Want the prime lot on a cul-de-sac that backs up to the woods? It could cost $25,000 or more extra. Another thing to keep in mind, some lots are only designated for some floor plans. A floor plan with a three-car garage probably won’t fit on every lot in the neighborhood. So, when looking at the lot plan, know which lots are available for the plan or plans you are interested in.
To avoid every house looking exactly the same, there are restrictions in most neighborhoods, so houses next to each other are not identical. Often, the same elevation of a home and same color has to be at least three houses apart. It’s something you have to keep in mind as you are considering which lot you like, and the home style you want.
When you decide to build, understand that depending on the builder and the demand, it could take six months before your home is ready. When you sign the agreement, you’ll need to make a down payment to get started. This varies by builder and can be as little as $5,000 or a percentage of the cost of the home. If you have a home you need to sell, I’ll get information for you on the builder’s policy on contingencies. Because of the demand for homes now, most builders won’t start digging until you are approved for a mortgage, including having a solid offer on your existing home. So, timing is important. Rest assured, I’ll be there to help you navigate the process.
For the serious porcelain egg collector, we offer this exquisite Vintage Style Decorative Porcelain Egg from the Pompadour Collection. A bit of history. . . it was Mme Pompadour who started the Manufacture of Sevres and thus established the fine art of decorative porcelain in France. Laure Selignac continues to strictly follow these processes and techniques in each and every piece we produce today. In her honor, we created the Pompadour Collection in her classic vintage style.
Every porcelain egg is hand-painted and detailed with fine gold. You can personalize this item with a date or initials at no extra charge.
Back in August, shortly after my essay on Henry Dumas appeared in The New Inquiry, I received an email from an editor inquiring about translating it into Italian. Here is the result in the link below. Grazie a Simone Orsello e http://www.edizionisur.it per la traduzione!
Click over to The New Inquiry for my latest article “Dry Bones Breathe” in which I discuss the writing of Henry Dumas and how his work relates to #BlackLivesMatter and Afrofuturism.
For the first time in twelve years I am not a resident of the five boroughs. I have moved to New Jersey, and next week I will begin a one year appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at William Paterson University.
I actually started drafting this post two weeks ago on Friday, August 8 as I was packing up to leave. The night before, on a beautiful, breezy early evening out at the Robert F. Wagner Park in Battery Park City, I went to see the Sun Ra Arkestra perform a free outdoor concert as part of the River & Blues summer concert series. I met up with some friends there, and ran into others in the crowd. The Arkestra put on a great show with some of their core tunes like “Interplanetary Music” and “Love in Outer Space,” and standards like “Fine and Mellow.”
As the dark swept around us and the skyline lit up, my eyes fixed on the cylindrical glass exterior of the 17 State Street building. It was in that building in 2003 that I began working as an office temp for Georgeson Shareholder, just a few months after I had moved to the city. It was while working there that I cooked up the idea to apply to the CUNY Graduate Center, and to do so in the English department instead of in history, the field I was most familiar with at the time.
That night I found myself looking up at that same building eleven years later, after so much had happened in my life including five moves, teaching at four different colleges, leading hundreds of walking tours all over the city, finishing a Ph.D., and a whole lot more personal drama than I care to share on this blog. Now, I’m preparing to take on a new job just across the Hudson. To say that “I felt like I had come full circle” would be the corniest thing I could write about that night, but, well, it’s hard not to come to that conclusion. Ultimately, it felt like a satisfying and fitting end to this chapter of my life.
And now, as I sit here finishing up this post in my new office at William Paterson, the next chapter begins.