74 Otsego

Here’s what’s changing in the world of Verona real estate this weekend, starting with a big price cut.

The asking price for the house at 11 Stonewood Parkway has been reduced to $599,900 from $649,900. This is a three-bedrooom, three-bath home with an attached garage in Verona’s Brookdale Avenue elementary school district. Gail Shepard of Coldwell Banker Montclair has the listing, and you can see the details here.

The asking price has also been lowered at 74 Otsego Road in the Laning Avenue elementary school district, by $15,000 to $444,900. The kitchen in the four-bedroom, two and a half-bath home has an adjoining dining alcove and looks right into the family room, which is always a plus for busy moms. Rick Lodato of Prudential New Jersey Properties has the listing.

But while those listings are going down, this one is going up. Louise Ozolins of Keller Williams Suburban Realty has raised the asking price on 217 Fairview Avenue to $429,900 from $350,000, citing fair market value. The home, which is in the F.N. Brown elementary school district, has three bedrooms and one and a half baths. The lots on this stretch of Fairview are among the deepest in Verona and back up to a defunct railroad line that is an excellent walking, running and biking path.

There are no open houses this weekend.

But some listings are still, inexplicably, displaying the old rate, 9.917. That rate was applied to homes that were not fully valued, as they are now, which means that a listing using the 9.917 rate could be way off on the home’s actual taxes. One home, which appears on Trulia.com as having taxes of $10,383, really now will cost you $14,288 in property taxes.

Not every real estate agent Web site displays the financial information on its listings. But if it does, look to see that the tax data is from 2010 and the rate is 2.422. The same holds true for the data sheets that are handed out at open houses. Caveat emptor, as they say.

235 Fairview Avenue

Two open houses and two price changes to report this weekend.

The first open house is on Sunday, August 22, from 1 to 4 p.m. at 235 Fairview Avenue, steps away from Verona Pool in the F.N. Brown Elementary School district. The cape-style house is priced at $359,000, and it looks from the photos as if the eat-in kitchen will need some TLC, but there’s a deep yard. The listing belongs to Pat Bilotti of Prudential New Jersey Properties.

There will also be an open house on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. at 42 Gerdes Avenue, which is in the Forest Avenue Elementary School district. The fully renovated three-bedroom, two-bath house recently had its price lowered by $5,000, and is now being offered at $585,000. The listing belongs to Jennifer Szewcyk of Coldwell Banker.

The second change of price is also in the Forest district. A five-bedroom, three-bath home at 19 W. Lincoln Street has had its price lowered to $520,000 from $539,900. It is on the market has a single family home, but the listing notes that there is a separate kitchen–and wine cellar–in the basement. The listing belongs to Jessica Young of Century 21 Van Der Wende.

Martin Ziolkowsky

When a raccoon falls through the ceiling inside your house, you have to make some changes. Making the outside of the house less raccoon accessible was step one. Step two was to fix the damage done inside.

Martin Ziolkowski, a Verona-based contractor who did a stunning job modernizing his own house on Cumberland Avenue, took down what remained of my old family-room ceiling and rebuilt it with no fuss, no muss and minimal disruption to our use of the room. He also corrected several construction mistakes made by the original contractor 50 or so years ago, who apparently owned neither a measuring tape nor a level.

Then it was on to painting. Rich DiGeronimo, a Verona dad I’d come to know through Verona Junior Wrestling, owns  Red Star Paint & Decorating Center in Montclair, and I’d heard through the grapevine that he carries low-VOC paints in a wide range of colors.

VOC stands for “volatile organic compound”, which is a windy way of saying the chemicals that gives you headaches when you paint. Paint products are the leading source of VOCs and, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, VOCs are the leading cause of indoor air pollution. Since we all spend more time inside buildings than out in the great outdoors, the health hazards created by VOCs have become a cause of concern. (The Verona Environmental Commission has information on VOCs in cleaning products here.)

Rich DiGeronimo

For about the last decade, paint makers have been trying to make low-VOC paints. I tried to like them, but their colors were limited to a handful of dusty, pastel shades that for some inexplicable reason were somebody’s idea of what an environmentally friendly paint should look like.

Until now. DiGeronimo’s store carries low- and no-VOC Benjamin Moore paints in every color you can think of. “And we can pretty much match any other brand’s colors,” he says.

The paints now account for 40% of DiGeronimo’s business. “They appeal to young mothers and parent with young kids,” he says, “which is pretty much everybody in Verona.” He should know, since his own kids are involved in almost every Verona sport, from baseball to football, swimming and wrestling.

Yes these paints are more expensive than the old stuff you used to buy. It cost me $42 to paint the ceiling of my family room. But I found some surprising savings along the way. The low-VOC brand, called Aura, is self-priming, so you save the cost and time of that step. The zero-VOC brand, Natura, needs a separate primer, but that comes in a zero-VOC version too. And since the paint was virtually free of fumes, I could move the TV and sofa back into the room before “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” aired that evening. DiGeronimo says that Aura covers very well, even in reds and the deep blue I was cajoled into using earlier this year to evoke a “Star Wars” feel in an upstairs bedroom. (Though most of the focus of low-VOC paint development has been on interior paints, Aura is available as an exterior paint too.)

“We have people here that can talk to you about what you’re painting and give you the right product for the job,” says DiGeronimo of his business, which he has owned only slightly longer than the 15 years he’s lived in Verona. “That’s what separates us from the box store. If you come to my store you’re going to see me again.” Either that, or on the sidelines.

According to Nate Thompson, one of the owners of Environmental Management Associates Inc., the company handling the cleanup, there will be three weeks of work at the site. The 550-gallon oil tank has already been dug up and removed. But the company must now prepare the area to remove some 500 tons of soil. Long steel posts that were delivered to the site on Tuesday will be driven into the ground to protect the gas and water pipes so that they are not damaged during excavation. EMA must then pump out and treat the groundwater on the site before the soil is removed. Thompson says his firm handles 10 to 12 remediations of this size every year.

142 Morningside Road

There are 46 apartments and houses up for sale in the Verona real estate market now, and six of them have had price changes in the last 15 days, including one that you’ve already seen on MyVeronaNJ.com. Here’s what’s up, or should we say, down.

The one-bedroom condo at 300 Bloomfield Avenue has been lowered to $199,900 from $224,900. The listing belongs to Christopher Coccia of Coccia Real Estate Group.

The two-bedroom condo in the Green Acres Drive complex has been reduced to $239,000 from $247,000. Tracy Chan of Century 21 Gemini Realty has the listing.

A charming house at 28 Cambridge Road with three bedrooms and two and a half baths is now $439,000, down from $455,000. Verona High School alumni Jill Savva of Savva Realty is the agent.

If you need one more bedroom than that, the house at 38 Marion Road has been lowered to $450,000 from $479,000. Steven Gendel of Keller Williams Suburban Realty has the listing.

The house at 142 Morningside Road was listed at close to $800,000 when we first did a House Snooping feature on it. It’s been through two prices changes since then, and now is being offered at $625,000. Lori Buck of Re/Max Park Square is the agent to see.

And finally, a four-bedroom home at 64 Fairview Avenue near Personnette is now $669,000, down from $699,000. Charles Barbarow of Re/Max Home Connection has the listing.

Who is 14 Manor Road for then? Someone who loves Verona Park: The land for the park belonged to the original owner of this house and the park is still the front yard of its half-acre property. Someone who loves Verona history: This house was built by the preeminent builder of Victorian Verona. Someone who lives, eats, sleeps, and breathes old houses: This one could be the grandest of them all, in Verona and maybe in all of Essex County.

The house at 14 Manor Road was built by and for Hiram Cook, a Yankee captain in the Civil War who arrived in Verona, improbably enough, as a land speculator in the late 1860s. A railroad line was in the offing and Cook bought land from what is now Wayland Drive clear through to the eastern shore of Verona Lake to capitalize on it. An engineer and carpenter, Cook built a series of houses across the tract, several of which survive to this day. “Captain Cook’s houses are very distinctive and they were very clearly his handiwork,” says Bob Williams, a Verona native and old house buff who is a descendant of one of Verona’s founding families. “Idlewood”, he adds, using Cook’s name for 14 Manor Road, “is one of the greatest houses in Verona.” (Williams’ book on our town’s history, “Old Verona”, has an extensive history of Cook and his house and is available through the Verona Historical Society.)

Time hasn’t always been kind to 14 Manor Road. The Cook family owned it until Prohibition, Williams says, when it became a rum-runner’s hideaway. It later served as a convalescent home. The original front porch, which you can see in the slide show below of photos from Williams’ collection, is long gone, as is its summer kitchen. The $475,000 listing, which belongs to Patricia Bishop of Prudential New Jersey Properties, notes that the house now needs a total renovation.

But the bones of this house are as grand as they are old. The double parlor at the front of the house rivals a McMansion living room in size and still has its original molding. The doors and woodwork are original, as are most of its gingerbread windows, and they have character you’d never get in a big-box store. The kitchen is a good size for any era, as are the four bedrooms upstairs.

And as its owner, you could sit on the front lawn and watch the picnics in Verona Park, just as Captain Cook once did.