Bill Primavera's (williamprimavera) Blog

Am I terminally weird or is everybody like me in wanting to surround ourselves in our homes with highly personal things that remind, motivate and inspire us to achieve certain goals, both professionally and personally? As a realtor who writes, I know well that when a home is on the market and pro...

Besides serving as a way to find where you live, can the name of your street influence the perception of your home and its value, positively or negatively? The thought occurred to me a while back when I read a newspaper report about a complaint among residents of a certain town in Putnam County w...

You can’t always believe what you see, hear or read, even if it appears among “All the News That’s Fit to Print” in The New York Times and is supported by research by the new professional designation of “experts in happiness,” associated with such prestigious educational institutions as the Harva...

While maintaining house gutters and drains in good working order can indeed be a real drain, it’s one of those essential jobs that can’t be avoided in protecting your life’s major investment. When I lived in the city, my house had a Mansard roof, only slightly pitched, that drained beautifully fr...

Do you remember the story of Chicken Little, the fable in which the central phrase is “The sky is falling?” Normally we apply the phrase to people who manage to incite an unreasonable fear in others, and recently I was told about a prospective homebuyer who had the heck scared out of her by the w...

When I was a kid in the dark ages, my family had but one telephone in our home, placed atop a designated “telephone table” in our entrance hall. It was a heavy, black pedestal model left over from the 1940s that rang loudly enough to alert everyone in the house and, whether in the kitchen, bedroo...

Did you ever say something to someone, offhandedly and unfiltered, where you immediately wanted to sink into the ground?  My worst experience like that happened when I was too young to know better, visiting close friends who asked me how I thought they might improve the decoration in their home. ...

     Of all the gadgetry in my home, there is one device with which I have an intense, almost unnatural relationship: my bathroom scale.      Each and every morning, I surrender myself to it just before I jump into the shower.  If this simple act stopped there, it would be considered perfectly no...

As Dolly Levi says in “Hello, Dolly!” “Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It isn’t worth a thing unless it’s spread around, encouraging young things to grow.” What she didn’t say is that you might save money in the bargain. And speaking of things that grow… In preparation for the sale ...

When my historic house was on the market almost two years ago, there were buyer prospects who fell in love with it, but in each case, the feedback from their agents was similar:  “Clients love it but don’t want to spend the time or money to update the kitchen.”  What?  Here I am, writing as The H...