Home Guru

By Bill Primavera It was more than 40 years ago, but I still feel the sting of being swindled by an unscrupulous home improvement contractor. As a young couple, my wife and I had just managed to qualify for a

By Bill Primavera The historic house was one of the loveliest I had ever listed, but it was on the market for over a year and, while it had many showings, it hadn’t yet gotten a single offer. When it

By Bill Primavera For more than a dozen years, The Home Guru has been observing and writing about the housing market and home building design, repair and maintenance. I have focused on hundreds of widely varied subjects, sometimes into areas

By Bill Primavera When she visited at Christmas, my daughter Emma alerted me that there must be mold in our living room. She could sense it as soon as she walked into the room, which is used only for special

 By Bill Primavera When you are working on a job around the house or in the garden, are you like me in that your mind wanders to dreams of worlds to be conquered or occasional regrets about paths not taken?

By Bill Primavera There’s some lucky stiff spending eternity on top of Marilyn Monroe, either through his vanity or warped humor or his wife’s open-mindedness or wealth, or whatever circumstances led to the shelling out of $4.6 million at auction

By Bill Primavera When I was a bachelor living in Manhattan, I had an acquaintance who would occasionally visit friends living in “the country” over the summer weekends. Maybe I was a little jealous about not knowing anybody outside the

 By Bill Primavera “Oh, no!” I exclaimed when I came home one evening to see the monstrosity of a commercial sign that had been installed directly across the street from our townhouse in Brooklyn Heights. It was a large glaring

By Bill Primavera This week, just when I thought I had finished my checklist of things my clients Diane and Don had to do prior to the listing of their home and the brokers’ open house, Don mentioned that he

By Bill Primavera For several years now, I’ve noticed that my Home Guru column has often shared the same page as the Miracle Home Improvements advertisement. I didn’t know anything about the company, so I thought I’d call and introduce