Determining the Square Footage of a Home

     Buyers and sellers are often confused about which area is included for calculating a home’s square footage. Does the measurement of square footage include the covered porch? What about basement and garage? When reporting the square footage of a home, only the space of finished living area in the dwelling should be included. A space is considered a living area if it meets all of the following criteria.

• Is intended for human occupancy.
• Is heated by a conventional, permanent heating system. (Any space that is heated by a portable heater does not count.)
• Finished, with walls, floors and ceilings of materials generally accepted for interior construction.  
• Directly accessible from other finished area. (Any part of a house that requires the use of a ladder to get to it does not count.)
  

Feng Shui – Part 1 Introduction

            With thousands of years of continuously recorded history, the Chinese civilization has produced a lot of practical techniques and philosophy, such as acupuncture and Feng Shui, which we still enjoy to this date. Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese art and science of placement. The principles of Feng Shui have a history dated more than three thousand years ago. Like all principles of modern science, the principles of Feng Shui evolved out of people’s observations of the nature and the environment around them. Unlike the principles of modern science, which are developed by a continuous process of corrections, the concepts of Feng Shui have not yet gone through any paradigm shift. Inevitably, some of the Feng Shui concepts would seem like superstition nowadays. Nevertheless, there are other Feng Shui concepts that appear to be well justified from a scientific point of view and still applicable to our daily lives.

Title Insurance and Available Policies for Home Buyers

     From the point of view of a home buyer, title insurance insures against financial loss from defects in title to real property.  (There is also title insurance that protects lender's financial interest.) Title insurance differs in several respects from other types of insurance. While most insurance policies guarantee against a specific type of loss (such as injury) at a future date, title insurance generally insures against losses caused by title problems that happened in the past (such as forgery, fraud, duress in the chain of title).