5 Signs that Your Monrovia Kitchen Needs an Update

Every Monrovia Realtor^® has heard this observation from a selling client more than once: “Now that I’ve fixed the place up, it’s so nice to live here!” It’s sometimes followed by a wistful, “I should have done it years ago!” They don’t need to add, “so we could have enjoyed it ourselves.”

The culprit has to be human nature—at least the part that resists spending money improving something that works (even if it doesn’t work all that well). One of the prime areas where this tends to hold true is in Monrovia kitchens.

Since it’s generally acknowledged that the kitchen area is one place (if not the place) that gets the most intense scrutiny from prospective buyers, it is also one of the first areas that sellers decide to update. For anyone who might decide to sell within the next few years, that makes a pretty good argument to go ahead now while you can enjoy the upgrades yourself.

Since everyone tends to get used to our households as-is, it can be helpful to step back and consider where “as-is” could also be “has-been.” Here are five leading signs that your kitchen would benefit from an infusion of energy:

Although everything is there (somewhere), you waste time every day rummaging for kitchen tools and ingredients. Cure: more counter and cupboard space.
You can’t make coffee and toast simultaneously. Cure: electric circuitry needs modernization.
You need a flashlight to read product labels. Cure: an interior lighting redesign or window enlargement.
Electric bills are painful. Cure: wholesale appliance upgrades (yesterday’s models can be serious power hogs).
You don’t like to be there. If the typical American spends 6 hours a week in the kitchen (for Monrovia, I’d guess that’s an underestimate), a quality of living improvement will result if those hours are spent in surroundings that please. Cure: a top-to-bottom design rethink is in order.

For sellers whose homes have been lingering on the market without success, that’s a sixth sign. Prospective buyers are quick to notice when Monrovia kitchens are outdated—and those who don’t flee are bound to subtract kitchen upgrade costs from any offer.

Even if selling isn’t on the immediate agenda, I’d be pleased to share some of the cost-effective ways today’s local homeowners are finding to bring attractive amenities to their Monrovia kitchens. Call anytime!

The Two Indispensable Words for Monrovia House Touring

When it comes to Monrovia house hunting, sooner or later you’re bound to find yourself confronted by a question of proper house touring etiquette. After all, you’re an invited guest in somebody else’s Monrovia home—someone who you don’t know, who isn’t around, and whose house rules are a cipher.

As you’d expect, the normal rules of courtesy apply—except when they don’t. For instance, if you are visiting a friend’s home, it wouldn’t be very polite to go about opening up the bedroom closet doors—but on Monrovia house tours, unless you are instructed otherwise, that’s behavior that gets a green light. You might be treated to a “peek and shriek” if the seller has resorted to some last-minute decluttering via closet-packing, but house touring etiquette says that closet inspection is legit. Closet space, after all, a valuable part of the home’s layout.

Less clear are any number of gray areas. When your house hunting leads you through an extensive number of Monrovia home tours, you’re bound to run into some of them. Guidance from the website Houselogic names the most common house tour protocol questions:

Is it okay to bring in my coffee?
Can I use the bathroom?
How about a quick selfie next to that nice [fill in the blank].
Can I plop down on the sofa?

Fortunately, you don’t need to dust off a copy of Miss Manners or send off a query to Dear Abby, because the answer to these and other modern house touring conundrums is summed up in a simple, “just ask.” Whatever the answer might be, you will have fulfilled your duty as a most conscientious house hunter.

One more thought: those two words have an alternate form that applies when I’m your buyer’s agent. We may be out together on the kind of comprehensive house surveying expedition I line up for my clients. I will have arranged a series of appointments with the Monrovia homeowners and their selling agents and put together a schedule with ample time to get us from place to place. When that’s the situation, the two words that solve all Monrovia house touring etiquette questions with a simple, “Ask me!”