Ridgewood NJ, Nestled on one of Ridgewood’s most charming blocks, this home on more than a half-acre is a must-see. Beautifully updated both inside and out with attention to detail. A tastefully renovated kitchen is the heart of the home, featuring white cabinetry, granite countertops, SubZero, Viking and Bosch appliances. The living room has refinished hardwood floors, fireplace with classic mantle, crown moldings and bay window. Off the dining room is a sunroom that overlooks a pleasantly landscaped yard and forest. Upstairs are 4 full sized bedrooms with refinished hardwood floors and 2 full baths with tub and shower. Off the kitchen is a screened porch looking on to the wooded backyard and paver patio. With a 98 ft wide and 256 ft deep yard, there’s room to relax and enjoy nature. Door to door bus service to Ridgewood schools, a short walk to NYC bus and a one way street make this home an ideal place to live. Marketed by Michael Shetler, 201-421-0506 cell or 201-445-4300 x231 office.
Open House Sunday July 10 from 1-4pm. 242 Gateway Rd, Ridgewood.
New Jersey is $26.52 per hour , New York is $26.69 , Connecticut is $24.72 , Pennsylvania is $18.27
The National Low Income Housing Coalition has released their yearly findings on what hourly wage an American needs to make in order to rent a two-bedroom unit in each state based off a forty hour work week, and compared to last year’s findings, this year is looking even more bleak.
With the cost of housing rising annually, Americans are struggling more than ever to keep a roof over their heads. As of last year, the demand for rental apartments in the US has reached the highest number since the 60’s, and still, many Americans, especially poor people and people of color, have not yet recovered from the economic recession. To make matters worse, millennials are now at the age where they would start buying homes, but more are choosing to rent, creating even more demand and further proving that millennials screw everything up. With demand skyrocketing and Americans struggling to make enough money to keep up, housing costs have inflated to the point where many can’t afford a place to live. Well, you know what they say.
NOTICE: ZONING BOARD OF ADJUSTMENT – SPECIAL PUBLIC MEETING – JULY 12
ZONING BOARD OF ADJUSTMENT
AMENDMENT TO MEETING SCHEDULE
SPECIAL PUBLIC MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
In accordance with the provisions of the “Open Public Meetings Act,” please be advised that the Zoning Board of Adjustment will hold a special public meeting on Tuesday, July 12, 2016, in the Village Hall Court Room, 131 North Maple Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ. The purpose of the meeting is to hold the Annual Reorganization Meeting beginning at 7:30 p.m. A regular business meeting will follow.
All meetings of the Ridgewood Zoning Board of Adjustment (i.e., official public meetings, work session meetings, pre-meeting assemblies and special meetings) are public meetings which are always open to members of the general public.
2017 candidate for governor Phil Murphy favors a gas tax hike to pay for the depleted state Transportation Trust Fund (TTF), but opposes the estate tax phase-out championed as part of a Democratic-Republican deal in the legislature. Max Pizarro, PolitickerNJ Read more
Need an experienced, certified NJ plumber for basement renovation plumbing in NJ? Call us today at A1 Sewer & Drain Services:
201-645-0888
Many homes in New Jersey are built with a basement, which may or may not have been converted yet into useable living space. A finished basement is a great way to add hundreds of square feet of useable living space to your home, with less cost and hassle than building a whole new addition. Many homes have over a thousand square feet of basement, meaning there’s plenty of space for that new bedroom, rec room, or man cave you’ve always wanted.
Basement renovation often involves installing plumbing to create an extra bathroom. At A1 Sewer & Drain Service, we’re drainage and sewer service contractors who specialize in wastewater, outdoor drainage, and bathroom plumbing. If you’re planning a new bathroom addition, call us any time for a free consultation and cost estimate from our experienced local plumbers, at 201-645-0888.
Adding a New Bathroom Addition in your Basement
Need an extra bathroom to accommodate a growing family? If you have an existing basement, you may not even need to build a new addition. Finishing all or part of your basement can add a great deal of extra living space, including much-needed extra toilets and showers. A new basement bathroom addition can even add market value to your home.
Basements are almost always located below the level of the main sewer line. Because of this, installing bathroom plumbing can be complicated. Vent, waste pipe, and drain pipe installation is the most difficult part of basement plumbing, and you’ll need experienced renovation plumbing and sewer service contractors to make sure that everything is installed correctly.
Basement Plumbing for a New Bathroom Addition
Any new drain lines in your basement bathroom addition will need to flow into your existing main sewer line. Before construction begins, contractors need to locate the sewer pipe, generally by finding the main stack and the cleanout. In urban and most suburban areas, the main sewer line runs into a municipal sewer system. If you have a private septic tank, the pipe will run toward the septic drain field.
To flow correctly, drains and sewer lines need a downward slope of at least ¼” per linear foot. This ensures that liquids and solids move at the same rate through the pipe via gravity, preventing clogs and sewer backflow. This can be tricky in basements, where the main line may not be deep enough to allow the correct drop per foot. To send water and effluent through the drain pipes against the force of gravity, you may need sewer ejector pump installation.
Sewage Ejector Pumps for Bathroom Plumbing
When the level of the main sewer line is too high for wastewater to flow in the right direction due to gravity, you may need sewage ejector pump installation to ensure that wastewater doesn’t back up inside the drain pipes. Ejector pumps are equipped with float switches, which trigger the pump to activate when the water in the ejector pump tank reaches a certain level. The wastewater is forced into the drain pipes, allowing wastewater from toilets and other fixtures to be safely removed without relying on gravity.
For toilets, many homeowners opt to install a grinder pump. This type of ejector pump grinds up solid waste into a fine slurry, helping to prevent clogged drain pipes and backflow.
Basement Sump Pump Installation in NJ
Regardless of whether your basement is used as living space, or whether it contains a bathroom, you may need to consider sump pump installation. Sump pumps remove water into the drainage system, preventing flooding and costly water damage. Because basements are located below grade, they’re at heightened risk for flooding from severe weather, burst plumbing pipes, sewer backups, and other emergencies.
Installing a basement sump pump can prevent thousands of dollars of costly water damage, making it a worthwhile investment for New Jersey homeowners.
Local NJ Sewer Service Contractors for Basement Bathroom Plumbing
Need an experienced plumber for toilet, shower, vent, and drain pipe installation in NJ? At A1 Sewer & Drain Services, we’re sewer service experts. We work with homeowners to install reliable, high quality plumbing for basement bathrooms and new bathroom additions. For a free cost estimate, call us today at 201-645-0888.
BY KATHLEEN LYNN AND DAVID SHEINGOLD
STAFF WRITERS |
THE RECORD
In the overheated housing market of 2005, Barbara O’Leary and Dennis Poletto bought a Bergenfield colonial for $440,000 — just five years after the previous owner had paid $175,000.
Now, they’d like to downsize into a place with no stairs. But they feel they can’t move, because real estate agents have told them their home would probably sell for about $330,000.
1st Place winner, Alexandra Gutierrez with Scott Garrett
May 26,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05) announced the winners of the 2016 Congressional Art Competition at Sussex County Community College in Newton this Saturday. The Congressional Art Competition is open to all 9th-12th graders from New Jersey’s Fifth District, and this year’s competition featured 90 pieces of artwork from New Jersey high schools in Bergen, Passaic, Sussex, and Warren Counties (full list below).
This year the winners were: 1st Place, Alexandra Gutierrez, “Split Vision,” Bergen County Academies; 2nd Place, Grant Brewster, “Forgotten,” Delbarton School; 3rd Place, Nicole Spangenburg, “Doug,” Wallkill Valley Regional High School; 4th Place, Nicole Spangenburg, “Rasta Man Dan,” Wallkill Valley Regional High School; 5th Place, Sophia Bevacqua, “Landscape,” Northern Highlands Regional High School; 6th Place, Nicolina Kanapinski, “Take Me For a Ride,” High Point Regional High School; 7th Place, Maansi Srivastava, “The Afternoon Glow,” Bergen County Academies; 8th Place, Sarah Vargas, “The Dreamer,” Bergen County Academies.
Each spring, the Congressional Institute sponsors a nationwide high school visual art competition to recognize and encourage artistic talent in the nation and in each congressional district. Since the Artistic Discovery competition began in 1982, more than 650,000 high school students have participated. Students submit entries to their representative’s office, and panels of district artists select the winning entries. The first-place winner from each congressional district is invited to attend a reception in Washington, D.C., and the winning artwork is displayed in the U.S. Capitol for a year. Read more here.
Students from the following schools will be participating (by county):
Bergen County Academies
Bergen County Technical High School (Student lives in district)
First-time buyers and low- to moderate-income buyers have largely been sidelined by today’s housing recovery.
The common cry is too-tight credit. Lenders have kept the credit box restrictive because they are gun-shy from the billions of dollars in buy backs and judicial settlements stemming from the mortgage crisis that they still face today. Now, the nation’s largest lender, Wells Fargo, says it is opening that box with a new low down payment loan — a loan it claims is low-risk to the bank.
“We are fully underwriting the borrowers, we are partnering with Fannie Mae to originate and sell these loans, we are ensuring the borrowers have an ability to repay and that they’re qualified for home ownership, but we’re simplifying things for the homebuyer,” said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president and portfolio business manager at Wells Fargo.
Ridgewood NJ, When it comes time to apply to colleges, we may not be serving our children well.
That’s according to a growing chorus of voices who work with youth and their academic endeavors. For example, Malcolm Gladwell, one of the most recognizable public intellects, regularly asserts that brand prestige from an Ivy League name doesn’t necessarily suit the needs of individual students.
Jeffrey Leiken, CEO of Evolution Mentoring International, agrees. He provides mentoring for teens and young adults, going beyond the typical work of a therapist by building a relationship so that they come to see Leiken as a trusted confidant who answers their late-night text messages and isn’t quick to label them.
“We continue to be obsessed with being associated with the top 1 percent of anything, whether it’s wealth, looks, social media followers or achieving that Ivy League status,” says Leiken, author of “Adolescence is Not a Disease: Beyond Drinking, Drugs and Dangerous Friends – The Journey to Adulthood” (www.Leiken.com).
“Far more important is not the school’s brand and our cultural obsession with it. Rather, it’s helping to ensure that every student who attends any school gets closer to reaching their potential.”
What criteria should students and parents look for when determining where to apply for college? Leiken offers some crucial guidelines to keep in mind.
• Seek a college with programs that may help with lifelong skills. Self-awareness, self-leadership, self-actualization – those qualities are often overlooked when considering higher education. Learning the tangible skills for a future job is important. However, those requirements change over time. Coursework, professors and other programs that speak to a student’s ethical intuition, however, make up the educational gold that is enduring. • Look beyond the typical menu of schools. There is a common denominator among millions of 17-year-olds: an anxious balance between their “reach” schools and their “safety” schools. It turns out that many college counselors guide these kids to a similar list of “reach” and “safety” schools – about 50 of them. Between public and private institutions, there arethousands of other schools to choose from! • Ask yourself, “Where will I flourish?” Learn more about the culture of these institutions. There are two distinct stages for young adults in college life: the time where students adjust to a new environment and, later, when students realize they are becoming independent adults. A name-brand school isn’t necessarily the best place for millions of kids to best reach maturity.
“Just as we don’t all wear the same size clothing,” Leiken says, “the intellectual development of young adults doesn’t always fit into the same small box of name-brand schools.”
About Jeffrey Leiken
Jeffery Leiken (www.Leiken.com) is the CEO of Evolution Mentoring International and is co-founder of HeroPath International. Leiken also is author of “Adolescence is Not a Disease: Beyond Drinking, Drugs and Dangerous Friends – The Journey to Adulthood.” He has presented at TED in Athens, Greece; guest lectured at Stanford University; and facilitated programs for teenagers on three continents and in seven countries, among other accomplishments. He has a master’s degree in educational counseling.
TRENTON NJ, Under a proposed bill customers would be required to pay 5 cents for every plastic or paper bag they use to carry their purchases .
An previous version of the bill (A3671) called for a bag ban by 2025, but sponsors discarded that idea. Efforts to curb plastic bag use have been under consideration since 2008 in the state legislature, including in 2012, although each time they have stalled.
California is the state that has a statewide ban on plastic bags and Hawaii has a de facto state ban because every county has adopted the policy.
If the bill becomes law, retail operators in New Jersey would begin charging 5-cent fee for each single-use carryout bag on June 1, 2017. Stores would keep a penny, as would the state Division of Taxation to administer the program.
The remaining 3 cents would be used to create the “Healthy Schools and Community Lead Abatement Fund” to support the testing of homes and schools’ water supply – a major cause of concern in the state.
While proponents of the ban claim “Plastic bags are a source of numerous environmental concerns,” We are still not sure how an additional tax is going to fix any environmental problems . Seems more to be another Trenton money grab using a “Feel good” ruse . Opponents say better yet to send the bags to Trenton so law makers can place them over their heads saving the taxpayers money and improving the quality of life in the state .
