Happy Snow Day to all of my East coast friends! If you’re keeping count, this is something like the 11th winter storm we’ve had this season. I’m honestly not complaining, though. We’ve got a couple little kids that haven’t seen much snow since they’ve been born. So this year has been fun, but yes, I’m ready for spring.
If you subscribe to our newsletter, this past week you would’ve gotten a list of 7 Ways I Doubled my First Home’s Value. If you would like to see that list, just subscribe to our newsletter by using the opt-in form to the left of this post.
In today’s post, I want to share with you 4 ways we added value to our current home. Next week, I’ll share with you several ways we’re going to add more value in the future.
Some things to keep in mind before you read this list… We haven’t had our home appraised since we moved in 3 1/2 years ago, so we’re assuming that these projects have added value, but we absolutely can’t be sure until we either get it re-appraised or sell it. That wasn’t the case with our first home, which I had both appraised on multiple occasions AND we sold it.
4 Ways We Added Value to Our Current Home
1. Removed All the Carpet and Added Hardwood.
When we first bought our home, we had the builder install wall to wall carpet in our family room, living room and office not to mention all the upstairs bedrooms. Within several months of moving in, we ripped out the carpet in our living room and family room and just recently added hardwood in our future office. This is probably the biggest home improvement we’ve accomplished to date. Very few buyers would prefer wall-to-wall carpet over hardwood, so this is one of those projects, where we can’t go wrong.
2. Added Traditional Features
Our dining room was majorly boring. Lisa wants to keep with the colonial look of our home and add some traditional elements to enhance the character of some of the spaces. The dining room was an easy place to start since we barely use it and the work wasn’t all that intrusive. We went with a traditional raised panel wainscoting and we’re super happy with the results. While I can’t be sure if a project like this truly adds monetary value, it can’t hurt. If nothing else, it makes the house more attractive.
3. Improved the Curb Appeal
Since we’ve been in this house, it seems like half of our home improvement projects have been to the exterior. We’ve added a shed, upgraded our flower beds, added landscape lighting and drip irrigation system so we can set it and forget it as well as a host of other curb appeal projects. In terms of adding value, the landscape lights really weren’t all that expensive and add a ton of interest.
4. Custom Furniture and Trim
This is one of our more recent upgrades. We built two custom furniture pieces that we don’t plan on taking with us. They’re built-in to the wall, so unless future buyers hate them, they’re staying. Custom pieces CAN add a lot of value, just look at your average home magazine and you can see that higher end homes have custom furniture all over the place. In addition to those cabinets, we’ve added chair rail molding in our vestibule as well as some extra trim to our crown molding to make them look bigger.
So that’s a quick summary of some of the value adding projects we’ve done since we’ve been in our new home. Keep in mind that ALL of these projects were done by Lisa and I and they are ALL doable by your average DIYer. If you don’t yet have some of those DIY, planning or power tool skills developed yet, then please stick around. The goal of this blog is to help you improve your DIY knowledge and skill set. And again, subscribe to our free newsletter for more exclusive content.
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In our next post I’ll share with you several ways we’re going to be adding MORE value with our future projects.
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