Coldwell Banker Triad, Realtors
The Triad leader in real estate services and technology since 1997 with over 180 agents in multiple offices throughout the Triad.
Our Iceberg is Melting is a short fiction story by John Kotter that I highly recommend reading. It is based on a community of emperor penguins and their home,
the ICEBERG. The penguins must face a potentially life threatening disaster and
they begin by burying their heads under their wings and grumbling really
loudly!
The story revolves around some big obstacles and even bigger heroic
acts. Some of the main characters like “the Professor,” “Buddy,” and “NoNo”
must take strong roles and lead to their strengths.
Before I go
any further, let me emphasize how truly grateful I am for the team I work with
each day, the stable community I live in, and the Clients we have the pleasure
of serving.
According the National Association of Realtors, nearly a third of real estate home buyers this year will be entering the housing market for the first time. As a first time buyer, you’ll soon find out that there’s so many roads that need to be navigated before moving into that first home.
That’s why at Coldwell Banker Real Estate we’re dedicating this entire week to helping the first time home buyer as they venture into the world of home ownership. Throughout the week on this blog as well as on the Coldwell Banker Facebook and Twitter profiles, we’ll only be sharing content that’s geared toward first time home buyers. READ MORE
On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was brought into this world in this very home at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, GA. It was a place he called home for nearly 12 years and was just down the street from the renowned Ebeneezer Baptist Church where he shared a pulpit with his father. While today we celebrate what Martin Luther King Jr. has done, we thought we should take a look at the place he called home.
The two-story Queen Anne style house is located in a neighborhood known as “Sweet Auburn” within Atlanta. The house has a one-story partial front and side porch with scroll cut woodwork trim, two porthole windows, a shingled gabled end, and a side bay. The home was actually owned by his maternal grandparents and was the dwelling place of not just Dr. King’s immediate family, but often other relatives and even boarders as well.
The house is open for tours and visitors are given a guided look through the place where Dr. King was born which is now a national historic site. The home has been wonderfully preserved and tours of the home often reveal a very different side of this historic figure than one might think. Details of his everyday life growing up and even the pranks he would pull on siblings is shared through the tales told to his sister.
You can get that warm, fuzzy feeling and make a few bucks by responsibly ditching all the excess stuff you accumulate, particularly at this time of year.
Before you cast off, sort out
This video by home organizer Alejandra Costello demonstrates her system for organizing items you wish to donate, sell, return, or exchange. You designate an area in the home — preferably near an exit -- for the stuff you don’t want to forget to take out the door with you. What we really liked best about this video is that she includes tips for keeping your downsizing efforts on track.
Hazardous household materials
Sure, we all know where to recycle stuff like soda cans and water bottles, but what about dicey items like medications, paint thinners, or asbestos?
Earth911.com, along with its free app iRecycle, is one of the best sources for finding acceptance centers that handle household hazardous waste. Just enter the type of junk you need to unload, like compact fluorescent light bulbs (did you know they have traces of mercury?), along with your ZIP code, and it provides the nearest recycling center to you.
Learn more about stuff that’s considered household hazardous waste, by watching this
hilarious Canadian video made for the city of Toronto.
Old technology
If you want to recycle appliances, cameras, computers, and TVs, Best Buy Recycle will take them, no matter where you bought them originally. The retailer charges $100 to pick up old appliances like TVs if you’re not also having a new Best Buy item delivered to you. It says it destroys CPUs to protect your data privacy. And the recycled bits and pieces become raw materials manufacturers can use to make everything from appliances to park benches. Check out the video:
Watch live streaming video from thebby at livestream.com
At some point over the next week or so you’ll probably be spending some more time at home than usual, and it’s quite possible that your home will be a little bit more crowded than normal too.
Schedules get a bit hectic and it’s nice to have some helpful resources at your disposal to keep your time at home enjoyable and your entertaining on track. We thought we’d see if we can help your home management over the holidays become a bit simpler with some simple but pretty awesome apps.
How did this happen? It’s a question I often ask myself. I am a lucky guy. I look back often at how far I’ve come in life and am amazed at how things have turned out. I’ve got a great wife, two amazing boys (and a dog), a job I enjoy and a home we love.
I’ve come a long way from my first $200 a month apartment in Providence, RI, that was home to a menagerie of insects that the landlord couldn’t get rid of. After that, it was a return to mom and dad’s for a while, then back to renting with roommates until meeting my wife. We bought our home in 1997 and recently completed an addition, so now it’s four bedrooms and 2 baths. It’s modest, but at the same time, it’s a dream house, an aspiration that I never thought I would achieve.
Even though we are not planning to move and quite frankly hope we never have to, I routinely wonder what my house would cost in other places. Since I travel some for work, I am lucky to see different parts of the country and always enjoy learning how our 4 bed/2 bath home would compare in cost around the nation.
In preparing for today’s launch of the Coldwell Banker Home Listing Report, I recently visited Los Altos, CA, the most expensive market in the nation where such a home might cost more than $1.7 million. The findings of the HLR made me feel pretty good! A house like ours in Westfield, NJ, would be a steal at $ $726,974.
It’s not uncommon for someone to miss the classic view of the control panel… the new look has everything sorted into a few categories so that what you’re after may take a couple of layers to find.
For example, let’s assume that I’m looking for the power settings on my laptop. When I open the Control Panel I initially see this:
With no direct reference to power settings, so it’s time to guess. It’s under System and Security but if you tried any other category you’d have to go back to the main screen and try again.
