What are the best home improvement projects to tackle before you sell your home? How much do you spend when you’re not planning to stay in your home for long? Where do you splurge and where do you skimp? What projects do you skip altogether?
My brain whirls with all the possibilities born from hours of watching HGTV! No, I’m not an expert, but I’ve watched enough DIY Network to know how to hold a trowel.
The best home improvement projects for resale
According to my beloved hgtv.com, the top three updates to improve home value for resale are:
- A minor remodel of the bathroom of less than $10,000
- Landscaping improvements of less than $5,000
- A minor kitchen remodel of less than $15,000
A major kitchen remodel of $40,000 and a major bathroom remodel of $25,000 were lower on the list, meaning you make some of that money back at resale, but not as much as the minor remodels. That’s why we’re planning to hold to pretty tight budgets.
We plan to tackle the three at the top of the HGTV list and several others of the 15 best: painting the exterior, adding a deck and patio and updating paint and flooring in bedrooms and living areas.
Other worthy upgrades on their list that didn’t make mine include improving the basement (nobody has them around here with our shifting clay soils), adding a bedroom in the attic (not a real option with our sub-par attic that houses two furnaces, their duct work, the water heater and, oh, about 129 storage boxes crammed full of important items like my college term papers and kid soccer trophies).
Our remodeling strategy: don’t procrastinate
In five years (or less), I want to renovate our 22-year-old suburban home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. When we sell it, I want to maximize our return so we can build our dream home in the Sand Hills of south-central Kansas. I’m planning to tackle at least one major project a year. The Fix It Farmer and I want to save money by doing most of the work ourselves. I also don’t want to leave everything till the end because we won’t get much time to enjoy it.
We did that once before. We lived in our first home for seven years but waited until the last year to do most of our improvement projects.
Shawn and I met and married while attending the University of Kansas. Go Jayhawks! His job helped pay for his master’s degree, but it required us to move to the San Francisco Bay Area.
We bought a 1200-square-foot zero lot line home in 1989 in San Jose. A zero lot line home – also called a patio home – sits right on the property line. My farm boy husband complained that he could not walk all the way around his house because some of the walls were behind the neighbor’s locked gate. I could trim the grass in the “backyard” (think courtyard) with garden shears.
We bought our first home in San Jose, Calif., in 1989. That two-story structure at far right is our neighbor’s house. See what I mean by a tiny property?
The 1970s home had brown shag carpeting, mustard yellow and burger brown patterned vinyl in a spacious kitchen, raspberry sherbet walls in the master bedroom with a whipped cream stripe racing across them and a pumpkin orange metal fireplace backed by smoked mirrors in the cramped living room. Mirrors, you’re not fooling anyone into thinking this space is bigger.
In Christmas 1990, you can see our lovely brown shag carpeting and the 1970’s space-ship-style fireplace burning. With me are our first “babies” Scamp and Idgit. In a year’s time, we’d have a different kind of baby with the arrival of Rachel. We replaced the nasty carpet before she crawled!
We purchased the home in the spring of 1989. Before we moved to Texas in the fall of 1995, we tackled a lengthy list of home improvement projects. We painted the lavender walls a soft peach and replaced the dark shag with a light beige short plush pile with stain guard. We added light tan vinyl and a peninsula in the kitchen for better storage. In the living room, we yanked out the mirrors and took the orange metal piece off the fireplace.
I spent hours hunched over saw horses in the garage stripping and sanding away the dark finish on the kitchen cabinet doors and replacing it with a light stain and multiple coats of varnish. We bought a bay window for the living room, installed it ourselves and created a custom window seat with storage beneath it to maximize our space. Shawn pulled out all the old baseboards and replaced them with new ones that I stained and varnished. We painted outside and added new landscaping for good curb appeal.
We did some of the work on evenings and weekends over the years, but we completed much of it in a mad dash in a few months. After our Realtor plunked a “For Sale” sign in the tiny yard, we looked around our spiffed-up digs and asked each other, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
We painted the house two shades of gray-green and added shrubs and flowers before we moved to Texas. Here I am with Rachel, who turned 4 right before we moved to Texas. Baby Rebekah must be napping.
We put in a bay window to get more space out of our cramped living room. Note the better carpet!
Igniting motivation in a procrastinator
I know myself, dear reader. I’m a deadline person. That’s why journalism works for me. I like deadlines because they light the fire of motivation.
I started the Plum Prairie Ranch blog, in part, to ignite my drive by the accountability factor. If I tell you, my dear friends, of my plans, I’m more likely to stick to them.
We have an ever-growing list of home improvement projects at our current address, including but not limited to remodeling the master bathroom and kitchen, replacing all the flooring everywhere, expanding the back patio and replacing the patio shade structure we built 18 years ago with something better and a host of smaller projects like killing off all the brass light fixtures and door knobs, redecorating most of the rooms (paint, curtains, etc.).
I get tired just thinking about it. And then there’s my not-so-little clutter problem. I can’t do some of these projects until I clear out some of the spaces. I digress.
This year, I’d like to tackle the master bathroom. I’ll write more on that massive project soon. And I plan to complete several small items on my to do list, like the front door I painted months ago.
Here at Plum Prairie Ranch, I aim to give you the unvarnished truth about DIY. As we embark on this adventure together, I’ll give you the 4-1-1 on the whole, messy, marvelous process. What did it cost? How long did it take? How crazy were we to attempt it ourselves? What did we chose to leave to the professionals? If we hit our marks, the pros will do very little of the actual work.
Let the demolition begin!
How about you? If you could do one home improvement project this year, what would it be?