How Home Renovation Projects Can Affect the Value Of Your Home?

After you buy your home, the one thing you soon realize is that the home is constantly under attack. This attack is against the physical components of the house and its economic value. There are forces that target the look and function of your home as well as its market value.

Some of these are:

• Natural wear and tear results in degradation of the home
• Brute force attacks by sun, wind, rain, and snow
• Biological and chemical agents in the environment exact their toll

But in addition to these three, there is another threat that may have an even bigger impact on the value of your property. The home design trends favored by homebuyers are constantly changing. Styles, that were in high demand yesterday, are considered obsolete tomorrow. 

And this is easily the biggest danger to the sustained value of your home.

How do you combat the things that threaten to alter the physical condition and monetary value of your home? There are only two ways to keep the age of your home and changes in buyers’ preferences from eroding your home’s value. These are:

• You must have a schedule of effective maintenance.
• You should occasionally update the look and function of your home to bring them to par with what buyers expect. Thoughtful renovations to your home can keep it up-to-date with market trends.

The best renovations for your home

Based on these, what are the areas of your home you should focus on when doing renovations? From market data on features that buyers love and are willing to pay the most money for, the most impactful renovations are kitchen and bathroom renovations. These two areas consistently yield the highest return in terms of how they improve a home’s value.

Kitchens

It is easy to understand why kitchen renovations have a big impact on the value of a home:

• Kitchens serve as watering holes for the family. As the equivalent of the water cooler in the office, they are social hubs where people share meals and trade conversations.
• They are a showpiece for the rest of the home. Homeowners like to receive visitors in the kitchen because kitchens are a showcase of the homeowner’s lifestyle.

So kitchens serve a very practical function and they also cater to our vanity. This is why home remodels that focus on the kitchen will improve the home’s value by around 50% – 82% of the cost of the project, depending on the size of the renovation. This ROI depends, to a large extent, on the scope of the project and the features that are upgraded.

The average cost of a minor kitchen upgrade is $21,000 and the return is around 81%. Projects that cost more deliver returns of around 69%. While homeowners who do micro renovations that don’t involve a lot of spending may see more than an 82% return on their investment. 

By performance, the most affordable but highly profitable kitchen renovation projects are:

• Swap out the hardware – Replacing cabinet pulls and handles is a cheap trick that instantly improves the ambiance of a kitchen, without costing homeowners too much in money or time.
• Update lighting – By strategically deploying lighting fixtures in a way that makes the kitchen brighter, bigger, and more colorful, the whole space is vastly improved.
• Repaint or reface cabinets – This is another renovation that does not cost much but has a sweeping impact on the ambiance of the whole kitchen.

Bathrooms

Renovating your home’s bathroom will have a major impact on the value of your home, but for different reasons than the kitchen.

Bathroom projects are valuable because:

• Unlike kitchens, bathrooms are very personal spaces. Because we use them for our personal needs, the level of comfort, privacy, and luxury a bathroom offers is important.
• Bathrooms are also important for their power to rejuvenate our bodies. We value them for how they impact our physical and mental health, as well as, our productivity.

A bathroom renovation that is thoughtfully executed will improve a home’s value by 60.2% – 67.2% of the project cost. Depending on the features that are changed, a bathroom remodel will cost $20,420 – $64,743, for midrange and upscale renovations respectively. It is also possible to renovate a bathroom for much higher or a lot lower than these amounts.

The highest performing bathroom remodels are not always those that cost the most but those that address the real problems of the bathroom and take into consideration the things buyers in a specific location want. 

Bathroom projects with the most ROI are:

• Improved plumbing – Swapping out plumbing hardware such as faucets in the bathroom can breathe new life into the bathroom area.
• Vanity upgrades – Given its role as a focal point in the bathroom, changes to the vanity and vanity area will have a huge impact.
• Repaint the bathroom – Painting the bathroom in modern colors will make it more inviting and improve the value of the entire property.
• Energy-efficient features – These can include energy-saving lighting, low-flow features, or even solar-powered heated floors.