How to Improve the Value of Your Home
Adding to your home’s value takes only a straightforward improvement project. You can choose an exterior project that improves its curb appeal, or you could upgrade the interior. Most projects cost about $10,000 or less, although bathrooms can cost well above that.
So, How do You Choose What to Upgrade?
Simply put, you decide what part of your home needs the most work and you fix that. You need both curb appeal and a nice interior, so decide which one needs the most work and start there.
If your home already looks good and has curb appeal, then consider expanding it to raise the home value. Increasing the square footage or adding a bathroom can help you raise the resale value.
To increase the square footage, you can build out, up, or down. That means you build onto your home in any direction. If you used all of the available percentages of your lot for your existing home, you can build down or up. Building down means finishing out your basement or building one. You can hire builders who dig a new basement and extend it under your existing home. You’ll need to provide a full bathroom and at least one bedroom for it to count as living space.
Building up means finishing out your attic or building a second floor onto your home. You’ll also need to add a bathroom and bedroom for this area to count as living space. Those two requirements must be met for any addition to count as living space.
What Projects Might Work to Increase the Value of Your Home?
You can Paint the Home
Either the interior or exterior. You can paint both for an instant increase. This costs the least of any project and you could manage to paint the whole home for $500 to $1,000 typically.
Build a Deck
A deck with an outdoor kitchen raises the value even more and makes the home more attractive to luxury buyers. You can build a deck for less than $1,000.
Add Insulation
Another relatively low-cost project is adding insulation. This project increases comfort and saves you money on your energy bills, plus costs little. You’ll recoup about 83 percent of it at retail. Adding insulation even keeps out noise from the street and your neighbors. You spend about $2,400 and it adds about $2,000 to your resale value.
Replace your home’s garage door with a steel design
This doesn’t mean stainless steel in color. These come painted or with a faux front to resemble wood. According to Remodeling Magazine, the average new garage door costs $3,907. You’ll recoup about 94 percent of its value at resale, adding about $3,662 to the home’s value. You get an enhanced appearance and security in the meantime.
Replace Your Home's Front Entry Door
Choose a colorful, secure door crafted of steel. You’ll spend about $2,080, but recoup 65 percent of that at resale. That adds $1,350 to the resale value of your home.
Add New Wood Flooring to Your Interiors
You will instantly update the interior as if you had redecorated but you won’t need to purchase new furniture to do it. This especially helps if you have an older carpet and it has become stained. Homebuyers like wood floors better than older tiles, so this project actually pays you back and you profit from it. You’ll spend on average about $4,700 on new wood floors but you will earn back at resale $5,000. That’s a 106 percent payoff.
Add a Stone Veneer to the Exterior
Done right, it will seem as if you initially built it that way. A stone veneer works well with brickwork or siding. Adding it creates a statelier appearance and the real plus is that you’ll earn back about 92 percent of the cost at resale. The average cost of $10,386 for manufactured stone veneer translates to nearly $10,000 added to your home’s resale value.
Create a Grand Entrance
Add to the stately appearance inside, too, by creating a grand entrance, also called a foyer. This costs between $10,000 to $12,000, depending on whether you need to widen the front door or simply erect a dividing wall between the front door and the room into which you enter when stepping through the front door. This makes your home a bit more traditional and nabs a feature from early 20th-century design, but foyers figure into most luxury homes of the 20th century and earlier. You’ll earn about 60 percent of the cost back at resale.
Replace the HVAC System
Replace the HVAC system and earn about 85 percent of the cost back. When you update the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, you create a more energy-efficient environment. Most HVAC projects cost about $8,200, but you’ll add approximately $7,000 to your home’s resale value.
| Square Feet | Average Cost |
|---|---|
| 1,000 | $4,000 - $5,000 |
| 1,200 | $5,000 - $6,000 |
| 1,500 | $6,000 - $7,000 |
| 2,000 | $7,000 - $8,000 |
| 2,500 | $8,000 - $9,000 |
| 3,000 | $9,000 - $10,000 |
Remodel Your Kitchen
Spend about $15,000 to $20,000 to redo your kitchen. You’ll need new appliances and flooring at a minimum, but you’ll earn back almost every penny in resale value. In the meantime, you get to enjoy the fabulous new kitchen.
By now, you’ve realized that you’d spend about $50,000 if you did every project and you’d get back in increased resale value, about 85 to 95 percent of that. Not a bad investment, especially in a sales environment where sellers keep having to drop the asking prices of their homes. With your changes made, you can earn more on your home sale.
Budget Items to Increase Value
But what if you do not have $1,000 to $20,000 to spend? Don’t worry. You can still raise the value of your home.
The little things really do matter. Look at your house critically, as if you were an appraiser. (Read our article on "What's my house worth?") Those tiny tiles that you lost right by the entry door need replacing. They’ll only cost you about $5 plus the cement to lay them in.
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If it’s brown or a dreary green, feed it plant food and spread some grass seed during a non-windy week. Water it properly. A green, well-manicured lawn goes a long way toward curb appeal. This total project costs you less than $100 and pays you back many times over.
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Besides making the home feel more comfortable by blocking drafts, you will also reduce your own energy bills. This costs less than $100. Depending on the number of windows your home has, it could come under $50.
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.Spend the $100 on a nice interior door to replace any of the old-style brown, particle board hollow core doors. You can buy solid wood doors for cheap, so make the inside look nice.
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Choose brass for an upgraded look and feel. Towel rings or towel racks and matching faucets and shower can cost less than $200. You can create a luxurious look for just a little though.
Another tiny bathroom to upgrade? Your medicine cabinet. It won’t cost more than $200 to install this new fixture but you’ll add to the overall ambiance of the room.
In the bathrooms and kitchen, redoing the floors with a simple tile can cost less than $100 for a small room. The upgraded appearance of the room, though, adds to your enjoyment now and the resale value.
How to Save More Money to Earn More Back at Resale
Do you wish you could afford high-end, yet you earn a starting salary? I’ll share a trick I used when building my research cabin at Lake Eufaula, OK. Find a Habitat for Humanity (HH) ReStore and shop there.
The ReStore is a fantastic creation of HH that helps everyone. The non-profit created a win-win-win situation by partnering with local builders in major cities where Habitat maintains an office. The builders donate materials leftover from their projects or that a client changed their mind about.
The doors in my cabin came from a historical office building that was getting demolished. The builder doing the demo wanted to save as much of the interior as possible and removed as many doors as possible. This included solid wood doors and wood-framed doors that featured full-length plate glass – both see-through and frosted. ReStore priced them at $40 each, so the see-through one provides a beautiful front door with a view of the fishing pond, while the frosted one makes a lovely bathroom door.
You can purchase any fixtures or material imaginable at HH ReStore but the stock changes daily. You might find three boxes of black slate flooring one day and Swiss wood laminate flooring the following day. You never know until you stop by and shop. Every ReStore has different items.
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