No More Estate Agent FeesWritten by Glenn Murray
Follow a few simple guidelines, and marketing your own home can be easy. And it will save you thousands.The recent property boom has a lot of people thinking of selling. Unfortunately, costs of selling can really eat into your profit. There’s nothing we can do about stamp duty, but one cost we can avoid is real estate agent fees. By selling your house yourself rather than paying a real estate agent, you can save you around $20,000 on a $500,000 sale. So what’s involved in a do-it-yourself sale? The two main ingredients are time and advertising. A quality ad and a couple of hours each week fielding phone calls and managing inspections can mean difference between a healthy profit and disappointment. Many people are intimidated by marketing aspect of selling their home. But there’s really not that much to it. You just need to write a description of your property, organise photography, and place an ad. Simple! Perhaps most important thing to remember when organising your own sale is you’re not selling a building - you’re selling a home and a lifestyle. Here are 10 Tricks of trade to get you started… Jot down your favourite spots in house and what you like to do in them. List your favourite local restaurants, cafes, and beaches – especially those in walking distance. Note any pleasant fragrances – plants like jasmine and gardenia, or evening sea breezes. Mention your favourite spot for a morning coffee, an afternoon snooze, or an evening wine.
| | Engraved Stones : Rock Artisans Meet TechnologyWritten by Liz Hekimian-Williams
Have you ever seen an engraved garden stone, address marker rock or memorial stone and wondered, “How did they do that?” The process of etching words and designs onto such dense and strong objects is actually accomplished through a masterful combination of imagination, art, skill, technology and nature. Stones found in a South African cave dating back about 77,000 years, etched with lines and triangles, appear to be among earliest hand carved engraved stones. Time intensive hand engraving with chisels and hammers actually continued as primary manner of etching stones even into 19th century. Technological advances, however, have since helped many stone artisans with their craft, resulting in finely engraved rocks that are created with more efficiency. And while hand engraving tools still find a place within stone artisan’s toolbox, sandblasting has become a more common technique for carving into stones nowadays. Interestingly, first patent for sandblasting equipment is traced back to 1870. That is when a Benjamin Tilghman is said to have obtained British patent. However, sandblasting machines seem to have become more widely available and used only after about 1930. What is a sandblaster? It is like a pressure tool that blasts out sand. It uses compressed air or steam to force sand particles at high speed onto rock. This wears out targeted areas on stone surface that artisans direct nozzle towards. As you can imagine, sandblasting equipment has helped stone engravers to greatly reduce their production time. So this has become an invaluable tool in their trade. Before actual engraving work begins, stone engravers must first select right stone and work on design and layout issues for each custom job. This includes deciding on or including specified font type and size, designs, and layout of elements on stone. Locating and selecting right one-of-a-kind stone with attention to size, coloring and shape for current stone engraving project also requires artistic eye of stone artisan. Then, a stencil is prepared and attached somehow to stone before engraving starts. Here again, technology has come to rescue. It used to take stone artisans many more hours than it does now to complete a stone engraving project. But design and preparation phase is much speedier now thanks to computers, scanning technology, drawing software, rubber cutting machines and rubber or vinyl stencil sheets already complete with adhesive backings. Finally, stone artisans use sandblasting and hand engraving as desired to deeply engrave message or image requested into rock. Cleaning stone and, if requested, painting inside of engraving, finishes up engraved stone project.
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