Walk in the shoes of a Parade of Homes judge and pick up a trick or two to apply to your own home search.
By JUDY STARK
Published May 1, 2004
ORLANDO - They're still building beautifully detailed houses with terrific floor plans and plenty of space. Our team of Parade of Homes judges was thrilled.
They're also still building houses with popcorn ceilings and vinyl floors - in a house that cost $272,000. Our team of judges was aghast.
I was part of a team of four - the others were a builder, a commercial architect and a sales and marketing director - who evaluated houses for the Home Builders Association of Metro Orlando. The parade offers 146 entries in a vast four-county area of Central Florida that required lots of driving. We moved right along, but it took us two full days to look at 15 houses. We judged townhomes from about $175,000 to $200,000, and single-family homes from about $250,000 to more than $385,000.
As you tour models locally, pretend you're a parade judge and imagine that you have to award a blue-ribbon award on the spot for some outstanding feature. What would it be in each house you visit? (Caution: Sometimes you'll have to look hard for a winning feature.)
Here are some of the pluses and minuses we found as we judged. What I learned from my fellow judges made me a smarter house shopper. These tips may help you do the same.
* Walls, floors and handrails: When the floors squeak . . . when you can see drywall dings . . . when the wooden handrails feel rough to the touch (what, there's a sandpaper shortage?) . . . those are giveaways that the finish work wasn't as carefully done as it should have been. I know, time is money, builders are working quickly to finish the house, close the sale and move on. Well, you're going to be living with those squeaky floors and rough handrails. How will this house wear? What will it be like two years from now? What do the builder's houses look like that he built two years ago?
* Read the upgrade list. We visited one sad little house where virtually everything that gave it any charm at all was an upgrade. Whoever can't afford all those add-ons is going to buy an awfully stripped-down house that will never look as nice as the model, and the owner may never know why. This poor little house even had an ugly fluorescent fixture in the kitchen.
* Kitchen checklist: Pull open a couple of kitchen drawers. Wiggle them left to right. How do they feel: solid or flimsy? Is there only one glide to hold them in place, or two? Your kitchen cabinetry takes a tremendous beating every day. Quality will pay for itself. Put your money here, rather than on a fancy light fixture you can always add later or a bidet you can live without.
* Look at the lighting. I've always thought of floor plans in terms of space and traffic flow, but Corrinne Bennett, who is in charge of sales and marketing at a traditional-neighborhood project in Huntsville, Ala., kept pointing out the natural light in the homes we toured. Where did it come from: Are there windows at varying levels so light penetrates throughout the day and throughout the house? Is one side of the house bright and one side dim? This makes a tremendous difference in the day-to-day livability of the house. We awarded one home the blue ribbon for "height and light": different ceiling heights, effective window placement that allowed natural light throughout.
* Masterful master suites. Lots of builders leave room enough for an armchair at one end of a master bedroom and call it an "owner's retreat." We saw a couple of homes that really set the standard for this space. The D.R. Horton "3338" at Magnolia Park outfitted this area as a roomy newborn nursery. In the Juniper Springs model at Vista Lakes by Park Square Homes, an adjacent bedroom opened into the master bedroom via french doors and was shown as a sitting room/study. It felt luxurious and inviting.
* Closet concerns: Exactly how many closets are there in the master suite? You'd be surprised how many homes show one closet for both occupants of the master suite. If this matters to you, mark your floor plan with care. And builders, please: Do not use those master closets as storage areas for your paperwork or the Christmas decorations. I should be envisioning how wonderful my clothes are going to look hanging there, not looking with distaste at all your junk.
* I never hope to see one: This was a new one on me: a whirlpool tub behind glass shower doors, which made it (a) hard to get in and out, (b) claustrophobic, (c) dark and (d) difficult to clean. What were they thinking?
* Details add up. We were all impressed with that Juniper Springs model's details: window seats, columns, arches, effective use of glass block in the kitchen, a well-thought-out floor plan. It's the layering of one well-done detail on another that sends a message of quality and care in a home.
* Missed opportunities: One of the categories in which we judges scored was "entry impact": When you walk in the house, what's your first impression? In one house, we looked straight through a nicely designed and brightly furnished model to a dark, gloomy jail cell of a lanai. No furniture, no greenery, no flowers, no nothing. Ten minutes and $100 at Target would have turned that from gloomy to glamorous.
* Try this: Everyone's building townhouses these days, and lots of buyers are asking for a first-floor master bedroom. Landstar's Cozumel model at Island Walk in Orlando showed how to do it, with a nice downstairs master, two bedrooms and a loft upstairs. The tradeoffs: limited living area downstairs in this house of 1,768 square feet and an alley-loaded carport instead of a garage.
* Snap, crackle and pop: I don't know what to make of the popcorn ceilings and the vinyl kitchen and bath floors in that one house. Were they trying for a 1950s retro look? Think again, please: The message that came through was "dated" and "downmarket." Harvest gold and shag carpet may be back, but never, never the popcorn ceiling. The vinyl flooring industry has been looking to reclaim lost market share with sophisticated patterns and colors, but that's not what was on display here. There's got to be a better tradeoff than this.
The Parade of Homes in Orlando continues through May 9. Details and a parade guidebook are available online at www.comehomeorlando.com
