Lifestyle and relationships, especially marriage and family, cannot be measured in ROI. My wife works in a well paying but high stress occupation. She loves to bake, her escape from her work demands. We remodeled our kitchen and I told her to design it with the appliances, cabinets, counters, etc. providing her with the means to enjoy her baking. She did, bringing her much happiness and me the world’s tastiest homemade baked goods, especially her sourdough bread…
When value added parallels housing in the vicinity. There’s a ceiling depending on location. A house that’s worth significantly more than others in the neighborhood can be hard to sell. All as I understand it, not as a real estate professional but after having been in the market for the past three years.
If I’m living in the home, I use up one month of its value every month. Quantitatively, every $10,000 is currently worth about $100 a month over ten years. So if I am willing to pay $300 a month, I might as well go ahead and remodel the kitchen. If I am willing to pay $600 a month, I might as well go ahead and finish the basement. For $100 a month, I could fix up a bathroom pretty nice! I might spend a half hour a day in the bathroom, or 15 hours a month, so for $6.50 an hour I can do that in a $10,000 nicer bathroom :-).
Adding a master bed and bath & increasing the square footage by 50% (from a 3/1 to a 3/2, with office space in master) immediately increased the value of my home by $100k… the addition cost $65.
As others have stated, when viewed from a strictly financial perspective, it almost never pays off. But, occasionally it does. When we were selling my husband’s bachelor pad condo, the neighborhood had gentrified and yuppies were snatching up snazzy condos. But non-improved units fetched a much lower price because yuppies didn’t want to do the work themselves. The kitchen in the condo was from the 80s, and cheaply done. Also it was small. It was so small that we didn’t have to spend a lot on materials; even good cabinets and granite don’t add up to much in a 10 x 7 space. We found a good contractor to install the cabinets and a few new appliances and gained about $50,000 on the sale.
Bottom line: it pays to evaluate the financials in each case.
Lifestyle and relationships, especially marriage and family, cannot be measured in ROI. My wife works in a well paying but high stress occupation. She loves to bake, her escape from her work demands. We remodeled our kitchen and I told her to design it with the appliances, cabinets, counters, etc. providing her with the means to enjoy her baking. She did, bringing her much happiness and me the world’s tastiest homemade baked goods, especially her sourdough bread…
When value added parallels housing in the vicinity. There’s a ceiling depending on location. A house that’s worth significantly more than others in the neighborhood can be hard to sell. All as I understand it, not as a real estate professional but after having been in the market for the past three years.
If I’m living in the home, I use up one month of its value every month. Quantitatively, every $10,000 is currently worth about $100 a month over ten years. So if I am willing to pay $300 a month, I might as well go ahead and remodel the kitchen. If I am willing to pay $600 a month, I might as well go ahead and finish the basement. For $100 a month, I could fix up a bathroom pretty nice! I might spend a half hour a day in the bathroom, or 15 hours a month, so for $6.50 an hour I can do that in a $10,000 nicer bathroom :-).
Adding a master bed and bath & increasing the square footage by 50% (from a 3/1 to a 3/2, with office space in master) immediately increased the value of my home by $100k… the addition cost $65.
As others have stated, when viewed from a strictly financial perspective, it almost never pays off. But, occasionally it does. When we were selling my husband’s bachelor pad condo, the neighborhood had gentrified and yuppies were snatching up snazzy condos. But non-improved units fetched a much lower price because yuppies didn’t want to do the work themselves. The kitchen in the condo was from the 80s, and cheaply done. Also it was small. It was so small that we didn’t have to spend a lot on materials; even good cabinets and granite don’t add up to much in a 10 x 7 space. We found a good contractor to install the cabinets and a few new appliances and gained about $50,000 on the sale.
Bottom line: it pays to evaluate the financials in each case.