Tour the HGTV Dream Home in Sonoma
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Good morning, bloggers!
I have been a busy bee this week tracking down answers to some of your questions. Most importantly, you can enter via mail and online and, yes, you and other members of your family can enter!
Here we go with other questions:
*The porch light is called Guild Hall Two-Light Exterior Pendant and was purchased on a shopping trip to nearby Santa Rosa.
*The chrome diamond-plate automotive tape used by Kim Myles in the kids’ room came from Pep Boys and is offered in a few different sizes.
*And to answer the heating system questions, we have two HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) units at the HGTV Dream Home 2009. Both are considered high-efficiency units and are manufactured by Lennox. The A/C is electric, the heating is natural gas.
I am also very excited to announce formally (you bloggers are always ahead of me) that there will be a tour offered of the HGTV Dream Home 2009. See details here. See you there. 
Your Super Fan
Gail
Beautiful house, but have your designers ever thought about a dream home that is wheelchair accessible? I was trying to visualize how to make this home accessible. . . it would be tough. Remember our population is aging. Not only is it fashionable to be green but accessible to everyone. Maybe next year.
I agree with others that HGTV should either give away 3 $450,000 homes AND pay the federal income tax and all other fees to move in… Then we can actually live there… The other thing is, the Sonoma home is the only one on that block with that value… Just look across the street from it, and it’s little cracker-box homes with no size, polish or pizazz… It’ll be hard to sell the Dream Home for its worth with all the other homes on the street being so sub-standard to it… And lastly, can the winner sell the house in order to pay the $700,000 federal income taxes, or will the taxes be due first? Those $20,000 property taxes will be due in April, as all property taxes are due every April and every December… That gives winners about 2 to 4 weeks to sell the house mid-March to mid-April, before those become due. As to any other fees, I hope the builder or developer or HGTV or anyone else will pay those… (And I agree that those Kelly Green walls in the master must go!) Otherwise, it’s a gorgeous mansion that I utterly love, on a street filled with simple, old, run-down cracker box houses that I really don’t love, and that will make it hard to sell the dream home for anywhere close to $2 million…
I'm rethinking my entries since I did the math…and now, that I'm reading that the other homes in the area are not of the same value I'm really wondering if it's stupid trying to win. The developer and/or promoters should step in to make the initial costs affordable (don't know if that ever happens). Also, it dawned on me that we would be paying income tax on LIST PRICES of all the items in the house. Very few people pay LIST PRICE when they shop around! When I look at $700,000 in income tax plus transfer, etc., I'm thinking the only way to afford it is to sell it…lol…and if the area doesn't warrant the price…you see where I'm going. I'm actually writing to HGTV to get answers to some of these questions…I'll let you know what they say.
Love this home. I live in Miami another housing bubble red zone and would move to Sonoma to live there if I won. The home taxes are about $3,700.00 for a $1,800,000.00 home per comparables for sale in the area unless a missed a zero. I’m single so would live there and rent the other room to a friend who lives in a expensive sardine can in San Francisco and would be willing to drive him to work each day to live there. Its only an hour away which I do everyday now in South Florida. Ive done allot of work on my place but strugling terribly with the mortgage and reduced wages at work so California would be a new start. =0)
I went to the ‘County of Sonoma Treasurer-Tax Collector’ web site and looked up the neighbor’s property taxes. And it was $19,574.80 split into two payments of $9,787.40 each, one due in April and the other due at the end of the year. That would be about $1,631.23 per month. That really isn’t all that bad since you wouldn’t owe anything on the house except for utilities, insurance and taxes. I hope the winner of this house can afford it and will be able to keep it for a very long time. It would be nice if HGTV could do something more to allow the winners to stay in the house for at least a couple of years.
Does anyone know how much in taxes is due if you win?