Bill Primavera's (williamprimavera) Blog

It’s a sure sign that you are getting up there in years when suddenly you find that you’re working with the second generation of family-owned businesses that have provided home maintenance services for many years. It happened with my tree service, my plumber, and now my lawn maintenance company. ...

When he said it, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. In just a few minutes of my meeting with my new customer, he managed to insult my national heritage while identifying himself as a racist at the same time. It was when I was young in the real estate business, but I still recall ex...

If your house is on sewer, you may think that this piece about septics has no application to you, but as I understand it, as many as a third of us within the reach of this newspaper are on septic. And if you’re not, you may someday fall in love with a house that is, like I did. Recently, when I s...

Imagine my surprise last week when I read a real estate piece in The New York Times about the home of my old friend and working associate Bill Houlton, whom I hadn’t seen or heard of in more than 30 years. I was sorry to learn that he had passed away before I had the chance to catch up with him. ...

When I was an aspiring actor doing summer stock, I appeared in the musical “Where’s Charley?” a funny farce by Frank Loesser and George Abbott set at the turn of the last century. One of the cute numbers sung by Amy, the ingénue, predicted such inventions as wireless telegraphy, horseless carriag...

Just recently I listed a raised ranch in Yorktown Heights that is set up perfectly as a multigenerational house, with independent living space for a separate or related family on each level.  Thinking about the prospects who might be interested in buying it, I am aware that there is a much bigger...

Outgassing. If you don’t know what it is, as I didn’t until recently, it might sound like one of those little slips in bodily function that all humans occasionally have, only outside. But it’s more serious than that. With its unfortunate name, outgassing, sometimes called offgassing, is the relea...

Ah, the ways of nature and how we roll with them on our own properties can be challenging indeed. Recently I read an article online warning of nine plants we should never have on our properties because of their invasive nature, literally taking over the landscape. I was reminded that of the nine ...

Just as my wife and I were congratulating ourselves for having created the most beautiful kitchen ever, eschewing white appliances for brushed steel and polished black, complemented by warm wood and state-of-the-art surfaces, we heard the bad news that the new, new thing is the “White Ice” kitche...

You’ve not likely seen a real estate column like this where a realtor acknowledges being in a quandary about why a house hasn’t sold when it should have long ago, and ponders why, generally, some houses get snapped up right away and others linger on the market for weeks, months, or even years, wi...