I get asked from time to time to provide some input when a client is considering doing some remodeling or other home improvements to their home. I always appreciate the honor when someone asks to help with this.
As such, I stick by some principles and try to impart these when taking a look at someone’s home. I don’t tell clients the specific materials or colors they should use. A home decorator with a nuanced eye for the color wheel is the right person for this. My focus is to help the homeowners make decisions that will help to boost the value of the property from a later resale standpoint.
Here are some a couple rules of thumb that I believe in when considering remodeling parts or all of your home.
Apply “Consistency” – Whether you only afford to go room by room in a home over time or can afford to remodel the entire house at once, it’s not about how long it takes to make the changes as much as that the changes you make give the home a sense of consistency. Here are some examples:
- You are considering remodeling the kitchen and changing out the cabinets as part of that remodel. You are also going to redo the flooring. Recommendation: Sounds great. Consider changing out the cabinetry and flooring in the bathrooms as well to keep the woods consistent throughout the home. If you can’t manage the entire expense, make sure your cabinet (absolutely) and flooring (if possible) suppliers will always have the styles and colors available when you can do them.
- You’d like to paint the entire house inside, even the doors and door trim. However, you want to brighten the trim and doors and doing so will make the color on the ceiling seem more dingy. What do you do? Recommendation: If you can have painters come in and knock out the entire job for you, I would do it. If this isn’t possible financially, then do a room at a time with a strong commitment to finish. Pick your paints, especially for the doors and trim that you plan to eventually carry throughout the home. For instance, “Cottage White” is a popular brighter white color. If in doing so, your ceiling is revealed as a lesser white color, then repaint the ceiling as well. You are working to update the home and make it feel bright and pleasant. The extra work is well worth it.
- You are going to paint the entire home. What colors should you use? Recommendation: I have no idea on the specific colors. But keep the use of colors limited. Future buyers shy away from houses where every room is painted a different color scheme (including bathrooms). It’s okay to use some different colors to enjoy your own home but try to have some consistent thread across most the house if possible. Stay away from the very dark paints that absorb all the light in a room. You might enjoy it but your visitors won’t.
- You are thinking about replacing the carpet in all the bedrooms with tile or other hard flooring. Recommendation: I don’t recommend hard surface flooring in bedrooms generally. Most buyers will want to see some level of carpet used in the home, preferably in the bedrooms. You can get away with one room being this way (example, the office) but more than that becomes a broader application of hard surface flooring that I don’t recommend. As well, tying into the consistency point here, odds are we are talking about introducing different hard flooring choices in a home. Buyers get nervous, and Realtors will too, when they see too many flooring varieties (especially hard flooring that costs a lot of money to pull out and replace) in a home.
“Dressed, but not overdressed” or right-sizing – What I mean by this is that when considering changes to the home you have to balance the changes you are making with how much value you could pull back out of the home later. Here are a couple examples of what I am talking about.
- An Avondale home was the most magnificently decorated home I have yet to go into. This home was so finely decorated, that you felt like the world’s greatest interior designer lived there. You completely forgot where you came from the moment you stepped in the door. The problem was that the home was in an average tract community and the changes to the home showed and likely cost more than one of the original models for the neighborhood. Unfortunately, the owners would never get back what they put into the home.
- A Phoenix home in a very inexpensive area was redone by a flipper. Granite counters and travertine flooring were put in. The problem here is that the home, though nice, now outpaced anything around it. The home could have used other practical changes (such as closing in the carport to make a garage) rather than high priced flooring and counters.
- A Chandler home in a gated, higher-priced community used wood laminate flooring through the house instead of natural wood. Here is the opposite. The home should have used a more natural wood flooring rather than laminate. They underdressed the home. You get the idea.
Consistency in application and right-sizing the home in such a way to make it feel more dressed, but not overdone (and definitely not underdone), is the right way to go here. If you are going to spend good money and it takes just a little more to make sure you take the home up a level overall, then do it. When a home needs an improvement, you want to make changes that elevate the home if possible.
Now, do take care to balance the above with the understanding that the homeowner needs to change the house in such a way that will make it very comfortable and enjoyable for them. Changes shouldn’t just be done to please a future buyer. They need to be special to the homeowner as well.
So, get busy and make that home yours!
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