We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children-Native American proverb

Kermit Baker, Chief Economist of The American Institute of Architecture confirms that the fat McMansion lady has indeed started singing.

“We continue to move away from the ‘McMansion’ chapter of residential design, with more demand for practicality throughout the home. And with that there has been a drop off in the popularity of upscale property enhancements such as formal landscaping, decorative water features, tennis courts and gazebos.”

Decorative water features reminds me of the gigantic water foundation that Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) gifts to psychiatrist Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal) in the movie Analyze This.

The closed loop

“For decades, the real estate industry has operated under the principle that the less information buyers and sellers have, the better it is for agents, lenders, title companies, and all the other folks who eat from the trough.  But the real estate tide seems to be turning, as the housing and credit crises of 2008 have heightened awareness in Washington, D.C., and on Wall Street about the catastrophic consequences of a closed information loop – Michelle Singletary of  Washington Post quotes Ilyce Glink in “Buy, Close, Move In.”

Only individuals who itemize deductions can benefit from the Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID), and the value of the deduction increases with the marginal tax rate. If the government wishes to promote home ownership, a refundable tax credit available to all taxpayers would be more effective.

Henry Paulson, former US Treasury Secretary, recommends that

We should go further and reduce the subsidy for home ownership that helped create the crisis.  The central place of home ownership as part of the American dream reflects a bias of our society that is unlikely to simply end.  Policymakers may well decide that we should continue to facilitate lower-cost mortgages through a subsidy to mortgage credit guarantors.  Even so, the scope of the subsidy should be reduced by rationalizing and reducing the missions of the FHA and the successor(s) to Fannie and Freddie.  I would recommend limiting the availability of the subsidy to smaller mortgages or lower-income buyers or both.  And the price the government charges this new private-sector entity for its credit guarantee must be high enough to leave room for a robust private-sector mortgage market that serves taxpayers and homeowners equally. The benefits of a reduced subsidy for home ownership are clear.  But we cannot move toward this model until the housing market is stabilized and housing prices are likely to rise.

Signature of Solon Golf Community Subdivision

A Signature of Solon resident approached City of Solon Planning Commission and stated that she believes there have been builders in the Signature of Solon neighborhood who have built homes and rented them prior to obtaining an occupancy permit.  Additionally, many Signature of Solon model homes were built but not sold and have become rental properties.  Many of these Signature of Solon rental homes are neglected and improperly maintained which is damaging to the Signature of Solon community. This resident was concerned that the appearance of some of the homes will affect overall resale in the Signature of Solon neighborhood.

It appears that due to  the economic downturn, builders and homeowners associated with some  Signature of Solon properties are renting homes out of necessity rather than facing foreclosure.  There have been some foreclosure filings on properties located on Royal Portrush Drive, Capilano Drive, Vahalla Drive, Bellerive Drive, Merion Court, Prairie Dunes Court, Sotograde Court in Signature of Solon.

Foreclosure decreases the property value by 28% (Campbell, John Y., Stefano Giglio, and Parag Pathak. 2009. “Forced Sales and House Prices.” NBER Working Paper 14866).  Some builders are facing property foreclosures because lenders have become conservative by cutting their line of credit.  Common sense lending standards mean that lenders expect builders to have their own skin in the game.

Home-equity loans and lines of credit are second mortgages.  Second mortgages are made after a primary mortgage is in place.  If a homeowner defaults, the proceeds of the home’s sale go first to the lender that holds the primary mortgage.  The second-mortgage holder gets whatever is left after the primary mortgage is satisfied.  Lenders are rightly shying away from secondary mortgages and rental occupancy permits will not loosen the line of credit leash.

Signature of Solon does allow home rentals, however,  a deed restriction stipulates that home must be owner-occupied for the first year to ensure that landscape work and proper maintenance is completed.  However, Signature of Solon does not request the tenant’s name.  Chagrin Highlands subdivision in northeast Solon also has a deed restriction similar to Signature of Solon.

A deed is the legal document that transfers ownership of real estate.  It contains the names of the old and new owners and a legal description of the property etc.  The deed is signed by the property owner.  Deed restrictions place limitations on the use of the property by the property developer.  It is my belief that some property owners may use a bypass  to get around a deed restriction.

Mammon, the God of Subprime Lending

The following is the testimony of Patricia Lindsay for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Hearing on April 7, 2010:

Credit, Collateral, Capacity and Character

Thank you for inviting me to speak this afternoon. My hope for today’s session is that I give you a unique perspective into Subprime lending. I know I was not alone in not understanding the steadily increasing risks taken in the years before my employer New Century Financial Corp. stopped making loans in March of 2007. I grew up in the real estate business where my father was a Broker and a hard money lender. A hard money loan is a short term loan to a borrower who has a significant amount of equity in the property and cannot qualify for a traditional bank loan. I became an Account Executive at Beneficial Mortgage the end of 1996. Beneficial was one of the original subprime lenders who held their loans in their portfolio rather than selling them. There were a lot of similarities between Beneficial and my experience with hard money lending, Beneficial and the various hard money lenders with whom I worked were very aligned in their thought process on how to evaluate a loan. We had three things that we used to evaluate a loan; Credit, Collateral and Capacity. We would look at these three C’s and if any were lacking, like credit, a borrower better have some compensating factors, like great collateral. There was a fourth C, character, that went missing when the loan process became more impersonal and the prospective borrower never met face to face with the lender.

The disapperance of Credit, Collateral and Capacity

I joined New Century Mortgage as a Wholesale underwriter in June of 1997 and left New Century in December of 2007. I was part of a skeleton crew kept on to help unwind the corporation after they filed bankruptcy. I found the lending standards at New Century were much different than the hard money standards I had learned. I really didn’t understand what it meant to securitize a loan, but thought they must have found the secret sauce, so to speak, on how to take already risky borrowers and give them more money than the traditional hard money or portfolio lenders could. I loved my job at New Century, and found my niche growing and developing fraud detection and prevention measures across all of the business channels in the company. New Century provided me with all of the training and tools I wanted and needed in order to be the best asset to the company. I attended numerous seminars, became proficient at my job then began speaking at the seminars and teaching. We talked about the three C’s when I came to New Century and common sense lending. These were terms I stopped hearing in the last few years. There was no longer any common sense, the three C’s had disappeared and the risk was layered rather than offset . The business became volume driven and automated. A broker could get a loan pre-approval in 12 seconds or less with our proprietary system. If we couldn’t close a loan quickly, one of our many competitors would. With this increased speed, I was tasked with finding a way to automate fraud detection. With the support and backing of Executive management, in 2005 I brought in a company who used our known fraud loans to build a predictive analytics tool that ran in tandem with our loan origination system. High risk loans were identified and reviewed by a local risk manager who either cleared them or recommended further action.

The growth and evolution of the subprime mortgage industry

The niche market of subprime lending grew and evolved into huge business when unlimited funding became available through Wall Street via securitizations. Before Wall Street came on to the scene, there were specialty finance lenders, like Beneficial Finance and Beneficial Mortgage, who filled this niche market. They catered to borrowers who could not qualify for a conventional loan because of poor credit, a high debt to income ratio (“DTI”) or other mitigating factors. They would offset their risk by commanding a higher interest rate and providing a lower loan to value (“LTV”) financing. The riskier the borrower (i.e.; unsteady income, poor payment history), the higher the probability of a default, thus the need to offset the risk by reducing the LTV.

The presence and impact of fraud in subprime origination

People who may not have committed fraud before did so by making material misrepresentations to buy a property. The 100% financing products on purchase money transactions provided a vehicle for people to enter into buying a property without putting forth any money. The stated income product eliminated the ability to prove fraud without supporting documentation. When previous products required some supporting documentation in order to get a higher LTV, it was easier to identify the fraud and stop it. Straw buyers were recruited for their credit scores specifically to avoid having to provide income documentation. And they would also claim that the property was to be owner occupied, as 100% financing was not offered on non-owner occupied properties. The numbers that we (at New Century) were seeing and identifying as true fraud loans were a minuscule number compared to the number of loans we were funding every month, so I think the products offered had a bigger impact on losses and defaults than fraud did, at least as far as New Century’s loans. .

The funding of subprime originators through the use of warehouse lines of credit

Many, if not all of New Century’s competitors were only able to operate with the use of warehouse lines of credit. These warehouse lines were provided by large financial institutions, many of which were the same Wall Street investors who would buy our loans. They very helpful in the sense that they made sure we had enough money to close the loans that they were waiting in the wings to buy. It was a very efficient model from a productivity standpoint. New Century had several warehouse lines of credit with many different banks which enabled the funding of 20k+ loans (approximately $5B) per month, at the peak. New Century did not have the liquidity to make these loans without the use of warehouse lines of credit. When New Century’s lines were shut down in March of 2007, business stopped. New Century’s repurchase requests increased significantly as well. There became a need for a new department to be developed  in 2006 to centralize these requests and help my department out. In early 2007, our repurchase process slowed, indicating there may have been a cash flow problem.

The impact of so-called “originate-to-distribute” model for mortgage origination and any concerns with that model

The Definition of a good loan changed from, “One that pays” to “One that can be sold”. The loans were no longer held by portfolio lenders, but sold to investors, most of whom placed them into securities. We had lost the ability to follow and monitor the performance of any loans that we did not hold either on our servicing platform or in a security we had an interest in. We did monitor the performance of the loans to which we had access, but this was not the whole picture. Virtually all of New Century’s loans were sold and or securitized and not held in a Portfolio. .

The quality of underwriting in the years leading up to the financial crisis, including the exceptions to underwriting policies and procedures that I observed

Loose guidelines allowed people to buy homes they couldn’t afford. Loan terms started in the early years, when I came on the New Century in 1997, with the 2/28 ARM (“2/28″), this is a 30 year adjustable rate loan that has a fixed interest rate for the first two years then would go to an adjustable rate, usually adjusting every 6 months until the loan became fully indexed. Later on, somewhere around 2004, the fixed portion of the loan was just interest only and a 40 year term was added into the products being offered, although the 30 year term was still the most widely used. These loose guidelines included 100% financing to borrowers with low credit scores and no supporting proof of income. .

Risk Management practices in subprime origination, including any changes in risk management leading up to the financial crisis

Risk managers at New Century were viewed as a roadblock rather than a resource in many instances. We had Risk Managers placed in production groups all across the country, and they had daily tasks that they were to perform. They would have targeted audits in addition to helping the group with researching any items of concern. Things like brokers on watch, multiple social security numbers for a borrower, or other discrepancies that needed to be clarified. If the risk manager could get to the bottom of the discrepancy and clear it, the file would be stronger because what started off looking like a problem was shown to be an error or whatever the case maybe. The real problems arose when the initial issue may have been cleared, but something else was discovered. One of the biggest changes we made in Risk management was eliminating a document we had called the Purchase Money check list (“PMC”). In the late 90′s we did a post mortem review of failed loans when New Century had taken a loss. An overwhelming number of those loans were purchase money transactions with certain  characteristics. To help mitigate any future losses, we required these transaction be reviewed by the local risk manager an fill out the PMC. During these reviews, many times the risk managers would find other issues that were not part of the PMC. The production groups were constantly complaining that the risk managers were finding other things when they were only suppose to be looking at the PMC. Around the middle to the end of 2005 at one of our Operations meetings it was announced that the PMC would no longer be used and we were “blowing it up”, which received cheers by sales personnel. There was a lot of tension in many of the groups between the risk managers and production. I was called upon to help bridge the gap with a couple of groups. The sales mangers would complain that the risk managers were “killing” their deals and making their account executives anxious. But there were also groups where there was synergy between risk and production, where the risk managers were respected and utilized.

For the most part, there was not an equality between production (front end before the loans close) and the back end. It was clear that the front end ruled because they were bringing in the revenue. The only time the back end, specifically Risk Management had any teeth was when fraud was proven. If fraud was proven, the loan was locked and declined. If there was no physical proof of fraud, it became a business decision whereby the sale managers had the final say whether the loan would proceed or not. .

The compensation and incentive practices for persons involved in originating subprime mortgage

Account executives, who were New Century employees who brought loans in from brokers, were primarily compensated on commission of closed loans that they brought in. I was compensated with salary plus bonus based on company performance with part of that being discretionary based on personal performance. The compensation was significant for the top producing salespeople, some of whom were making several million dollars a year. Many of the sales managers and account executives lacked any real estate or mortgage experience. They were missing the depth of experience necessary to make an informed lending decision. These same sales mangers had the ability to make exceptions to guidelines on loans, which would result in loans closing with these exceptions, at times over the objections of seasoned appraisers, underwriters or risk personnel. Some of the best sales managers had underwriting backgrounds and were more closely aligned with risk management and better at understanding potential problems, but this was the exception and not the rule. . The growth, prevalence, and impact of so-called “exotic” mortgage products such as low documentation and stated income loans, and teaser rate mortgages: • The stated income, high loan to values (“LTV”), coupled with the 2/28, interest only (“IO”) loans impacted the market by making purchasing a home as easy as it has ever been. Property values were climbing due to the easy money and  excessively low interest rates. Any problems, including fraud or defaults were being masked by the rapid housing appreciation. .

The role and practices of appraisers in subprime mortgage origination

Properly valuing a property (one of our three C’s, collateral) is one of the most important components in a loan. In my experience at New Century, fee appraisers hired to go to the properties were often times pressured into coming in “at value”, fearing if they didn’t, they would lose future business and their livelihoods. They would charge the same fees as usual, but would find properties that would help support the needed value rather than finding the best comparables to come up with the most accurate value. Some appraisers would take boards off boarded up windows, to take the needed photos, then board the properties back up once the shots were taken. Or they would omit certain important elements of a property by angling the camera a certain way or zooming close in to make the property look the best possible. This level of appraiser activism compromises their objectivity.

At the end of the day, we had a system that went into a downward spiral because of layering risk rather than offsetting the risk because there was such a huge demand for the products. Our loans were sold before we even made them, which put more pressure on the production groups to get loans closed. Wall Street packaged and sold the Residential Mortgage Backed Securities to unsophisticated bond buyers/ investors. By unsophisticated, I mean they did not understand the true risk of the underlying loan product. The process was so convoluted it was nearly impossible to get a fraud loan pulled out of the entanglement to repurchase it. I actually had a Wall Street investment banker chastise me for trying to buy a fraud loan back. This particular loan was back in 2002 or 2003 when there were hardly any loans coming back from investors. His comment was, ” You want me to pull this one loan out of this security? Do you know what I have to do?” He proceeded to tell me that he had to find another loan to put in its place and asked if I really needed to pull it. To his credit, he did as I asked, pulled the loan and New Century repurchased it. It was at that point that I began to get a taste of the complexity of how securities worked.

The rating agencies improperly rated these securities, deeming them much safer than they actually were. It seems the lending process needs to return to the basics; true risk based pricing and transparency. We have to look at the kind of market we are in, do we have cheap money with increasing housing prices? If so, the loan to value ratios should be reduced to accommodate the increased risk. I just know if I am loaning my personal funds, which I have done on several occasions, I want to ensure I’m protecting my investment. By extension, the same common sense should apply in the marketplace. A return to our core guidance of the three C’s, and offsetting the risk rather than layering it.

A real estate player and a naive home buyer

They might tell you that you don’t need a real estate attorney.  They might tell you that its a waste of money to hire a real estate attorney because the home buying process uses standardized forms.   They might tell you that its not the practice to hire a real estate attorney in your town, city, area or state.  They might tell you that most people do not hire a real estate attorney.

One or more of the following parties may have a vested interested (they eat from the same trough) in a home buyer, buying a home, any home:

1. The home builder
2. The seller’s real estate agent
3. The buyer’s real estate agent
4. The home seller
5. The buyer’s real estate agent
6. The real estate broker
7. The lender
8. The mortgage broker
9. The home inspector
10. The home insurance business
11. The title company
12. The local home maintenance businesses

A wolf is necessary to keep the fox on the straight and narrow.  A detail oriented real estate attorney is the best deterrence to gray area practices and to represent a home buyer’s best interests.  If the real estate attorney happens to be from the same city in which the home is located and is knowledgeable about the current real estate conditions, even better.  A real estate attorney may explain to the client:

1. Why a quitclaim deed is inferior to the warranty deed
2. If you live in a recourse or a anti-deficiency/non-recourse state
3. The differences between the two party mortgage and the three party deed of trust
4. Whether your state uses mortgage or deed of trust mechanism.
5. The differences between a judicial and non-judicial foreclosure
6. Anti-deficiency clauses, if any, for your state.

The lender knows the answers to the above issues and the borrower should too.  What could happen if you don’t hire a real estate attorney?    As an example, read about Bonita Bay Group and Bonita Bay Residents-An Issue.  What do you think?  Hiring a real estate attorney is worth the few hundred dollars or not?

A fool and his money are soon parted-Thomas Tusser

Bonita Bay

I purchased a Toyota Sienna from a property developer who also owned one of the most beautiful homes that I have ever seen.  A few months after the purchase, this Toyota Sienna started displaying the Check Engine light and it was diagnosed with the P0420 Code disease.  A Bonita Bay sticker is still attached to the windshield of the Toyota Sienna.

Bonita Bay Group is a real estate developer of master planned communities in Southwest Florida.  It is headquartered in Bonita Springs.  Bonita Bay Group’s developments include The High-Rises at Bonita Bay in Bonita Springs, Mediterra and TwinEagles in Naples, Sandoval in Cape Coral and Verandah along the Orange River in Fort Myers.

An issue between Bonita Bay Group and Bonita Bay Residents

William Bulkeley writes in an article titled dated September 24, 2009, Teed-Off Residents Drive Developer to Brink of Ruin..

Today, like many other Sunbelt developers, Bonita Bay is being squeezed by debt and plunging sales. But its biggest problem is a dispute over the deposits homeowners plunked down for memberships in the golf clubs, a marina and other clubs. Many members want to quit the clubs and get their money back for reasons ranging from cheaper golf elsewhere to the desire for ready cash. Their membership agreements say the deposits — up to $185,000 per member — are refundable on demand, a relatively unusual stipulation homeowners say was a big part of the appeal of joining. Yet Bonita Bay says the agreements also stipulate that the rules “may be amended from time to time,” thus allowing it to cancel the refund policy at its discretion — and that at any rate, it can’t pay the money. Angry residents have filed at least 15 lawsuits against Bonita Bay seeking the return of their deposits and accusing the company of civil fraud. They say the right to amend the rules doesn’t apply to the refund policy. Bonita Bay has already closed the golf club at Twin Eagles, its latest development, where most of the lots are unsold and weeds are sprouting from the bunkers.  In addition to threatening a bankruptcy filing if it has to refund deposits at the other clubs, the developer says it might have to shut down the clubs entirely unless residents come up with millions of dollars to buy them — a prospect that has homeowners doubly steamed.

This case should be of importance to many citizens because several agreement documents state that an agreement can be amended at any time.

Think of a home as an interesting opportunity, then follow Warren Buffett's quote

Designer-builder John Abrams of the South Mountain Company describes three factors that are driving the popularity of large size homes:

“First, with less of a sense of community and public life in our culture, the home becomes a fortress which needs to contain everything we need, including multiple forms of entertainment, rather than basic shelter;

second, the building industry has been selling ‘big is better’ and the message has been heard; and

third, diminishing craft and design generosity has resulted in sterile homes — people mistakenly think that what’s missing is grandeur: more space.”

We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over leverage our balance sheet says Warren Buffett. It should be noted that Warren Buffet does not refer to the financial balance sheet, I reckon he means the life’s balance sheet of which the financial balance sheet is a small part.  Warren Buffett is reported to have defined leverage as a fancy term for debt by Wall Street.

I hear media reports where financial advisors talk about about good debt and bad debt.  I think there is no good financial debt, whether its origin is your local pay check cashing business or a Wall Steet firm.  If debt was good, Microsoft Corporation and Cisco Systems would not have billions of dollars of cash on their balance sheet.  If debt was good, Warren Buffett would be borrowing money from Goldman Sachs and Harley Davidson and not investing in them.

Debt always comes with strings attached and the borrower becomes one of the puppets in the show whether the borrower is an individual or corporation.  Debt is anti-personal freedom and therefore is not a value of Americaneers.  An exception, an example of a good debt is that intangible obligation that one owes to one’s parents or to your teachers or to one’s country.

Related Post: Sarah Susanka Defines a Beautiful Home

The costs of buying a home over 30 years

Zac Bissonnette writes about real estate and remodeling hype:

Your home is not an investment: Really, it isn’t. An investment is something that gives you money and an expense is something that costs you money.  Therefore your primary residence is an expense.  Real estate may well be a fantastic investment, but primary residences are only good investments to the extent that they’re cheaper than renting.

The most common type of residential property, a single family dwelling, does not produce a positive cash flow.  In areas of transient population, par employment conditions and moderate to low population growth projections, this is particularly true over the long term.

Pouring money into your home is not an investment: There’s certainly something to be said for “investing” in your quality of life but in financial terms, it’s a much better idea to put money in a savings account or use it to acquire an investment property than it is to pump cash into your primary residence or vacation home.

The intangible benefits of owning a home are significant.  However home ownership equation should include job stability and security, employment opportunities for self and family members, hospitable weather, recreational opportunities, personal lifestyle factors and Plan B.

The longer you plan to live in a home, the less financial sense it makes to pour money into it: If you are planning to stay in a house for five or 10 years, recognize that almost no home improvement projects qualify as investments. The reason is that projects like kitchen and bathroom remodels depreciate quickly.  A 15-year old bathroom will likely be remodeled by the buyer, so it’s not a value-add.

Don’t fix something that is not broken.  Make do with what you have.  Keeping up with the joneses ain’t smart despite the debatable notion that we live in a image based society, its not parallel with American values.

Real estate agents are salespeople.  Some are real estate experts.  Most aren’t:  Getting a real estate license requires a few hours of classroom instruction and a multiple-choice test, much of it covering legalese and ethics.  It’s entirely possible to become a real estate agent without knowing anything about anything, and many agents are completely worthless.

Folks should look into having a real estate attorney represent them in the most expensive purchase of their lives.  Good real estate agents are hard to find, they are not as easy as finding a needle in a haystack!.  Finding a good real estate agent that will represent the principal’s interests well is harder.  I don’t think the current real estate system is designed to totally protect the consumers, in some cases, it does just the opposite. Consumers have to be responsible.

How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Ask your real estate agent to provide you plan drawing showing sizes of all the rooms.    Bring a tape measure and measure the size of each room.  Measure the size of your own furniture and check if it will fit in the room.  If your vehicle looks like a humvee, measure the garage (length, width and most importantly the height) too to make sure that it will fit the humvee and an assortment of stuff and the brother in law.

2. Home Staging Trick: The showrooms in some new condo buildings use smaller furniture, large mirrors and other space-expanding techniques to make the condo units appear larger than they are.

How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Ask to look at a condo unit that has not been staged.  Measure the size of the rooms and your own furniture and check if your own furniture will fit.

3. Home Staging Trick: Your real estate agents may insist on viewing the house when it’s empty.  They may say that this  gives you time to examine it at leisure.  That may be true, if you spend time measuring and working on a detailed checklist.  A dinner table designed to seat 4 persons may be used as a staging prop and you might want to fit in a dinner table that seats 6 persons?   Appliances and kitchen items may be removed from the kitchen counter top to make the kitchen space appear larger.  Measure the kitchen counter space available, visual observation is not good enough.  Bright and attractive decorative prop items may be temporarily installed in the rooms to alter visual attention.

How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: View the home when the owners are present.  Check to see if the kitchen feel spacious with several people in it. You can imagine what it would be like to live there yourself, with all your personal property.  But you might find that the real estate agent might be less supportive of you meeting the home owners.  And if you do find a real estate agent who will provide for this, do me a favor by passing me that real estate agent’s contact information!

4. Home Staging Trick: Some home stagers may empty out closets to make them look larger than they really are and give the illusion of plentiful storage space.  Clothing items in the closet may be arranged to maximize space visibility.  A smaller sized bed mattress may be used to make the bedroom appear larger.  A small sized dresser may be placed or the dresser itself may be removed.

How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Measure the size of each storage closet.  And I hope you will be measuring a walk in closets and not the silly one rod closets.  Make sure that the bedrooms can accommodate your king size mattress and other necessary furniture.

5. Home Staging Trick: Some home stagers may try to create a relaxed, elegant mood.  You might encounter jazz on the stereo, wine glasses on the dining table, a roaring fire, fresh or plastic flowers and homey fragrance.

How to Neutralize this Home Staging Trick: Imagine the same house with kids yelling, the neighbors fighting, your teenager playing annoying music that no other family member can understand, speeding vehicles and yesterday’s unread newspaper spread out on the floor.

The devil is in the details-German proverb.

Map of City of Solon Subdivisions

Arlesford Arthur Meadows Ayleshire Bainbridge Park Brainard Estates Brennas Landing Briar Hill Brighton Park Brushwood Cambridge Park Cannon Estates Carriage Park Chagrin Highlands Chagrin River Farms Chagrin Valley Estates Cheswick Churchill Downs City Farms Clandon Park Estates Cloverly Colonial Forest Constan #1 Creekside Estates Deer Lawn Farms Delamere Court Emerald Ridge Fairfield Estates Farm Hill Forest Hills Greenfield Hannover Woods Harper Pointe Harper Ridge Heritage Estates Heritage Landing Hidden Creek Hidden Lakes High Point Highland Loch Holly Hill Horseshoe Farms Hunt Club Huntington Huntington Woods Ingomar King Ranch Kleinman Sheridans Park Ledge Hill Ledgebrook Estates Liberty Hills Longview Heights Luczek Subdivision Maple Hurst McAfee Meadow Estates Meadow Lane Metro Court Miles-Highlands Allotment Neptune North Arthur North Hill North Park North Woods Oakview Estates O’Neils Landing Outley Park Parkside Trail Pepperwood Lane Pepperwood Park Pettibone-SOM Preserve Rollingbrook Sherbrook Sherwood Park Signature of Solon Solon Acres Solon Small Farms SOM Hills Southside Spring Lake Colony Springside Summerset Svoboda Sycamore Estates The Allotment Thornbury Timber Trails Timberlane Union Properties Valley Lane Estates Wellingford Wellingford Estates Willow Grove Windrush Windy Hill Woodhaven Woodhaven Estates Woodlands

Sarah Susanka Photo: Cheryl Muhr

In an article titled, Remodeling on a Not So Big Scale, published online at Washington Post website; architect, author and breast cancer survivor, Sarah Susanka notes that,

“We’re re-embracing a value from the 1950s and earlier where people weren’t constantly thinking of moving up.  In many ways, I hope this book will remind people that it’s okay to settle, to stay in a house and really enjoy that house.”

Architect Sarah Susanka has a link to:

• Build Better Not Bigger and
• Quality Not Quantity philosophies.

Question: Is Sarah Susanka worried that her stay-put, make-do message might alienate real estate agents?

Sarah Susanka: “I have a feeling that realtors have the same problem as owners.  They have frumpy houses they need to sell.

Question: How does Sarah Susanka define a beautiful house?

Sarah Susanka: Of course it’s in the eye of the beholder.  Maybe I can do it if I tell you what I find not beautiful: a window that’s off-center from a gable, houses that are so cramped that there’s no place you can breathe, houses with tall ceilings so you feel like you’re in a series of elevator shafts.

Source: Remodeling on a ‘Not So Big’ Scale By Nora Krug, March 26, 2009, The Washington Post

I know a few families that live in cookie cutter houses that have tall ceilings and huge windows that look ugly and don’t work over a long term.  They have cookie cutter houses because the builder gave them 3-4 building plan options to choose from.  These houses have elevator shaft like rooms that have been packaged and labeled as rooms with cathedral ceilings.  I think that cathedral ceilings ceilings are meant for a cathedral and they have been transplanted into home designs to provide a false sense of grandeur.

During cold weather their home heating utility bills are high because they have to heat large volumes.  During summer, they do not open the curtains because they are concerned that the sunlight coming through the huge windows might damage their furniture and electronics.

The staircase to the upper floor have about 15-20 steps with no landing and hand rail on one side.  The staircase steps are covered with a slippery carpet.  The risers and treads of the staircase are uncomfortable.  They having a ceiling fan in their elevator shaft living rooms and its not easy to clean the fan or change the light bulbs.  They spend a significant portion of their holidays cleaning their houses instead of doing things that matter more.