Interior Paint
$$$Painting can be a great investment in your home or a horrible mistake. It all depends on the color you choose. Pick right and you earn a big payoff. Pick wrong and you devalue your home.
Don’t think you can escape the issue by painting the walls white. "Too often, homeowners think it’s best to paint the house all the same color, but there is no pizzazz with white walls," says Realtor Lynn Anderson of ZipRealty, East Bay, California. "Soft, muted colors such as pale green or muted beige with white baseboards can still be neutral while greatly improving the look and feel of each room."
Rejuvenate Landscaping
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Your house never gets a second chance to make a first impression. Shabby shrubbery and a patchy lawn make people assume the inside of your house looks as bad as the outside.
"Keep improvements on par with the other homes in your neighborhood," says Pam O’Connor president of RELO/Leading Real Estate companies of the World. One RELO client in Atlanta transformed his large backyard into a soccer field. "When he sold the house, the owner didn’t recoup his investment because the new owners didn’t care for his choice of landscaping," she says.
Stick to the basics. Trim or replace overgrown shrubs, plant colorful flowers to highlight your home’s best feature and install a new front door, garage door and mailbox, if necessary.
Screened Room
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Turning a deck, porch or carport into a sunroom or screened patio creates a great space for entertaining, but it won’t add equity to your home. In fact, you can’t even count that additional square footage as part of the house unless it’s insulated, heated and cooled for year-round use, points out Realtor Nancy Jones, an agent with Hunt Real Estate ERA, Williamsville, NY.
"A nice sunroom addition on a great house in a highly saleable neighborhood could add some value," she adds. "In other areas, it’s just extra space and is not going to net you much more on the sale of your home."
Deluxe Kitchen
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Do custom kitchen cabinets, built-in warming drawers and professional-grade appliances call your name? Tell them to call someone else.
Unless you’re in a very high-end neighborhood, stay away from professional appliances and stone countertops. An average upscale kitchen remodel costs nearly $82,000 nationally and returns only about $70,000 at resale, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
The typical rule of thumb is to spend no more than 15 percent of the value of the house on the kitchen, but that figure includes the cost of the contractor and doesn’t apply to every home. "You have to be careful, because some markets won’t bear 10% to 15% of the value of the house," warns Real Estate Broker Mark Riley of Mark P. Riley Luxury Real Estate Group, Sarasota, Fla. "If you use 10 percent of a $250,0000 house, that’s a nice, but not high-end kitchen."
