House hunting can be kind of fun. Especially in diverse communities such as Markham, it is always interesting to see the variety of home designs and the different interior décor options.
When you’re looking for a new home, it’s important to pay close attention to what attracts you to one house over another. Sometimes more easily determined than others, certain factors can contribute greatly to making a house feel like your new home.
“Curb appeal” is the attractiveness of a home when viewed from the street – or curb. Studies show that many homebuyers decide they like a home within the few minutes of first seeing it, thus making curb appeal an important determining factor to keep in mind.
Fixtures & Chattels
When purchasing a home, you must keep in mind that many of the features that contribute to the overall attractiveness of a home may not be included in the final purchase. It is common to see features such as fixtures and Chattels be excluded from final purchases.
Fixtures include all those items that are securely attached to the house; such as chandeliers and kitchen sinks.
Chattels are any moveable pieces of personal property including kitchen appliances and the furniture in the home.
How to Get What You Want
By default in standard purchase agreements, fixtures are included with the house and chattels are not. However, there are circumstances you should look out for if you want to avoid unpleasant surprises when you move in.
Look Out for Excluded Fixtures – Sometimes the fixtures in a house, like an heirloom chandelier, have personal value to the sellers. To keep the chandelier, the seller must specifically exclude it in the Purchase Agreement. So if you walk into a home and are blown away by the light fixtures, or any other fixture, make sure they are not excluded when it comes time to buy.
Include Chattels You Want – Again, kitchens are big selling features and, as a buyer, when you spot one that is just right, you may not want to change a thing. But, while kitchen appliances are often included in a sale, the sellers have the right to take the appliances with them. If you want to have kitchen appliances or any other chattel included in the sale, you need to say so in the purchase agreement.
It’s also important to be very specific, even to the point of including appliance model names and numbers. If you simply add “kitchen appliances” to the agreement, the sellers could replace the ones you saw with different appliances.
Remember to pay attention to what you find attractive about a home you want to buy, and make sure you get what you expect when you buy it.