With kitchen cabinetry, insisting on a certain look can add more to the cost than most homeowners realize. It can be like paying $3,000 extra to get a car painted red instead of taking the same model in blue. Functional upgrades to cabinetry will make daily life easier. Kitchen designer Bart Bauer shows you how to make sensible choices, save money and still love your new kitchen.

Homeowners today are likely to put off regular home maintenance chores, even the straightforward must-do’s that are cited. Neglecting maintenance — and selecting cheaper materials when building a new home — can cost at resale time.

Focus groups may not be as helpful as home builders think in helping them understanding what buyers want. A behavioral economist and a behavioral psychologist suggest alternatives that would get closer to the truth that builders seek.

“Smart Money” in home building means getting the best house within your budget rather than the biggest house or most trophy features for the least money. Katherine’s tips include hiring experience, hiring architect and builder at the same time, and focusing on lifetime cost rather than first-time cost in choosing materials.

Where do you want to live when you turn 70? If you’re like most Americans, according to AARP, you expect to be living where you are right now and to stay there for the foreseeable future. But there is another way to spend your retirement years. You can become part of a multi-generation household by moving in with one of your adult children and his or her family.

With smart-grid technology, a household receives real-time information about its electric use, online or via a digital-display dashboard. Homeowners find it easier to manage energy use, and the two-way communication system helps utilities run their business more efficiently.

Resale or brand-new house, the kitchen is the first stop for most prospective buyers and often the reason they choose one house over another. As they look and linger, what questions should they be asking themselves?

Peter Eisenman, one the world’s most respected architects, is known for provocative designs that challenge conventional ideas about what buildings should look like, how they should function, and how we experience them. In a recent interview he talked about the difference between houses and homes, with a lesson for every homeowner. “Architects design houses,” Eisenman said. “I live in a home.”

If you can apply a hard-headed business perspective to a home purchase, you don’t need a deep understanding of environmental issues to make a decision that is more environmentally benign, according to Mathis Wackernagel. He devised the Ecological Footprint, a widely used metric for assessing the impact of human activities on the earth’s resources.

If you’re considering building a granny flat, Michael Litchfield’s In-laws, Outlaws, and Granny Flats will get you organized. The book offers a brief tutorial on planning and zoning review process, tips on kitchens and bathrooms — the costliest part of such a project — and 30 inventive examples that range from tiny to merely small.