3 Ways to Increase Your Home’s Value
The road to selling your home can certainly be a long one. But whether you are selling now or in the future, it’s important to invest in your home to capitalize on its value. With housing prices on the rise, you are going to want to make a plan to ensure that your home improvement projects pay off. In order to maximize the value and get the most out of your efforts, your plan should involve a new paint job, redoing the flooring, and opening your home up to create more space.
Paint
Painting your home inside and out is one of the simplest and most cost-effective improvements you can do to your house. A fresh interior paint job has the potential to transform the feel of your house, making it look clean and enhanced. That being said, if you feel as though painting every room in your house is overkill, the two essentially rooms to paint are the kitchen and bathrooms, as these are the two rooms in your home that most likely receive the most foot (and eye) traffic. With regard to the exterior, first impressions are everything when trying to sell a house. Thus, a new paint job will spruce up the exterior and make your home appear more inviting and attractive to new visitors. In terms of color, neutral-colored paint will brighten your entire house and make everything appear cleaner and bigger. With the average gallon of paint costing around $25 – leaving you plenty of money to purchase rollers, tape, brushes, etc. –this project will turn out to be relatively inexpensive!
Flooring
Floors are one of the most overlooked aspects of a home simply because people don’t tend to look down all the time. A great way to boost your home’s value is to refinish scraped or scratched hardwood floor. While you may not realize it at the time, doing this will without a doubt improve the look of any space. Carpets tend to be a little more complicated than hardwood floors. If your carpet is scuffed-up and needs to be replaced, you have a couple different options. First, if your carpet was originally installed to cover and hide your damaged wood floor, it will almost always be less expensive to refinish the hardwood underneath rather than purchase a new carpet. However, if you feel as though the carpet is the best look for your home and you are not worried about the price of purchasing and installing a new carpet, then the carpet is probably your best bet!
Open Spaces
Last but not least, creating more open spaces – or at least the appearance of open space – will add more value to your home. Open spaces are more inviting, attractive, airy and can have a significant impact on what others think of your home. A severely cluttered and messy room will only exacerbate feelings of claustrophobia and drive away would-be buyers. An easy way to make your home feel bigger is to let natural light flow through by opening the curtains and blinds. Additionally – and this depends on the level of clutter – it may be wise to hire a professional organizer in the months leading up to getting your home ready to sell. This will guarantee you don’t waste your time attempting to create more open space and allow you to allocate your efforts towards adding value elsewhere in your house.
Starting with these three tips will ensure that you are on your way to increasing your home’s value. But don’t stop here, there are a myriad of other ways to add substantial value to your home – low-maintenance landscaping, improving the air quality, planting a tree, etc. The earlier you plan to add value to your home the better, so get to work!