To Improve or Not to Improve That Is the Question

How handy are you?  Do you have what it takes to run with Chip and Joanna Gaines?

If you are, then you could be way ahead of someone who hires a contractor to get the improvements done, and probably just aren’t worth doing if your plan is to sell anytime soon.

Here are the home improvement jobs as done by a professional and what the return would yield in the marketplace today.  Obviously having to pay someone else to get the job done is the night the ideal route if you want to not only make the money back but also make a few extra bucks along the way.

For example, I took an unfinished basement of our home and turned it into “the pad” for my oldest son.  He has his own gorgeous bathroom, with beautiful tile, an enormous carpeted bedroom King size sleigh bed, and a closet with built-in shelving and racks.  He also has a separate gaming/movie room with a full-size couch, drum set, and 60” plasma for the Xbox all on nicely laid laminate wood that is hard to believe isn’t real wood.   I did hire a few subs to help out along the way, an electrician to add a panel, some drywall guys for the mudding and sanding (I can mud but not as fast as they can, and I hate the sanding).

All in all, my project complete was under $20,000 as compared to the average by a contractor of around &75,000.  Doing it myself was a third of the price and therefore yields a return in value to cost of around $20,000 vs a net return of a negative $25,000 or so as seen below.

“© 2017 Hanley Wood, LLC. Complete data from the Remodeling 2017 Cost vs. Value Report can be downloaded free at www.costvsvalue.com.”

The lesson here is, if you can do it yourself (or with just a tiny bit of help) then there is a lot you can do to a home to create additional enjoyment now and value for later, but if you have to hire a professional to do the entire job, you just won’t recover anywhere near what you will have to spend to make the improvements and therefore might just not be worth doing.