Matching A Building to Your Personality Type

July 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Historical Home in Johnston Street Annandale 

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It’s always something that draws a person towards the apartment building of their choice. More often than not, that facet involves the architecture of a place. There are seemingly more styles of architecture to choose from than there are buildings! With Victorian, Gothic, Ultra Contemporary, Colonial, Post-War, Post Modernist, and even just ‘plain vanilla’ brick to choose from, deciding on one at the expense of another can be heart wrenching. One way to help determine what might be best for you at any particular point in time is to take a look at your personal possessions.

You need not take a look through the boxes of mementos you’ve acquired over the years. But you should take a long and hard look at your furniture. If you’ve trended towards glass, chrome, black leather, and contemporary items such as a huge flat screen television with a great direct.tv package, it probably speaks to your architectural type more succinctly than your clothing, for example. You should not take that consideration lightly. Choosing the right space can make all the difference between your desire to be productive and thrive, and feeling as if you’re languishing.

That’s because every person does better in life by matching up their surrounding environment to their personality. If you like your place spotless, well lit, and spacious, the comfortable space of a smaller building constructed with efficiency in mind is not going to appeal to you. Any successful life coach could tell you that thriving is a matter of surrounding yourself with what makes you happy. Pay a lot more attention to the architecture of a place before you decide to move in – it could pay dividends!

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Examining the Benefits or Disadvantages of a Multi-Story Home

June 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When looking at homes, one consideration to think about is how many floors you’d like in your personal living space. If you’re buying a home that you hope to live in with your spouse for the rest of your lives, the number of floors is an important consideration. It’s also a tricky one. Let’s take a look.

 

A multi-story home is ideal for a large family. Noisy kids can occupy rooms high on the upper floors where their playing, roughhousing, and general childish behavior won’t interfere with the adult dinner parties. That’s an important consideration when one is often host to important parties where high level business or political discussions are taking place. While it’s well done to include the kids in the meal if appropriate, when the discussions reach their full level following dinner, it’s best if kids aren’t interrupting frequently. That includes playtime noises, which can be far more distracting.

 

Besides the lofty concerns of quiet time and privacy inside of one’s home, another consideration raises its head for the long-term resident. That concern revolves around accessibility. It is infinitely more difficult to deal with stairs, particularly multiple flights of stairs, when one is aging. The situation is even worse when one has added a few years and finds themselves in a situation where they are recovering from injury. Stairs can add a challenge to one’s life that is insurmountable. In time, the upper levels of the home might be abandoned altogether. Rather than simply examining the utility of multiple rooms and several stories of home in the future, it’s important for a conscientious buyer to think of these considerations in advance.

 

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Reduce Your Home’s Environmental Footprint

June 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Xeriscape symbol

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One of the landscaping notions that is gaining traction across the country seems to take a step backwards from traditional landscaping efforts. That is the practice of xeriscaping. Rather than hiring a landscaping crew to come by, dig out most of your native plants, and put foreign specimens back in their place, the new idea is more environmentally friendly. That’s because most plants, tree, bushes, and shrubs which are inserted around homes and buildings require irrigation to thrive, or even survive.

 

Adding irrigation is a touchy concept in an era where attaining fresh water is a daily problem for billions of people on the planet. Some people feel free to utilize hundreds of gallons of perfectly drinkable water on a single patch of landscaping. Others see the catch 22 nature of the problem.

 

For those so enlightened, xeriscaping offers a palatable solution. Rather than have the local tree and dirt crew plant water-hogging greenery, another solution is used. Plants which require very little water are used instead. This solution is not that hard to picture, nor implement. While a xeriscaped yard might end up having a ‘desert plant’ sort of feel to it, it will have far less of an impact on local water supplies than the alternatives. Even a yard of lush green grass will probably require more water to maintain that green color than a well designed swath of low maintenance plants and shrubs. The benefits are obvious to anyone concerned about water use and distribution. Besides being a very conscientious choice, moving to a xeriscape plan in one’s yard is likely to cut down on the water bill!

 

 

 

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Determining Land’s Best Use

June 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Land conservation efforts exist in disparate regions of the country. The function of these non-profit groups is to approach private landowners and entice them to set aside their land to be included in local conservation efforts. As part of the enticement, large sums of money are involved in the form of special tax savings. Not only that, but the landowner retains ownership of the property. Before you start thumbing through your local phone directory to contact a conservation agency and land this unexpected bonus, you’ll want to consider the key aspect of the deal. When setting aside land for conservation, agencies aren’t looking for a few hundred feet of suburban tract. They’re looking for thousands of acres of land that’s still undeveloped.

 

Land conservancy is a special incentive to owners of large amounts of real estate, such as ranchers, to help aid in the slowing of overbuilding. The focus happens especially in areas where private, developable land is in scarce supply. The struggle for everyone involved is to determine the land’s best use. The subject of how best to use real estate is divisive.

 

Some feel that building a lot of dwellings in a place only decreases the attractiveness of the area. Not only that, but development adversely impacts wildlife habitat. Migrating animals have often wandered through particular areas for generations to deal best with the local weather changes as the seasons pass. However, that could be said of virtually all land on the planet, so it’s often a hard argument to make stick. Landowners are the ones who ultimately make the decision; propelled there by what they feel is the real estate’s best use.

 

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