Home Buyer Tips for Remodeling — When Dreams Meet Reality!

Home design is a huge part of the real estate business. Although it is usually discussed by sellers when staging a home, in my opinion, it should be celebrated more by prospective buyers. After all, planning for your future home’s interior and exterior design is something you do instinctively from the very first moment you see a potential house. Walking through the property, you are mentally stripping away the seller’s possessions and trying to envision what your items would look like in their place. You try to determine if the master is large enough for your current king size bed or if the carpet and wall colors are something you can live with or must be replaced right away. Although it is a natural process for some, seeing a home’s full design potential can be a bit overwhelming, especially to the untrained eye. With that in mind, here’s some food for thought!

• Not everything is better in black! Painting the interior of a home is one of the quickest and cheapest fixes anyone can do that will yield a fresh new feel. The key is to be able to train your eye to see through a bad paint job and a few hours of labor.

• It’s all about pretty packaging! Landscaping an overrun front and back yard is totally possible and less expensive than you may think, if you do it yourself. All it takes is a few shovels, maybe a rototiller, sod, a few potted plants and some fresh mulch to transform any outdoor space.

• What lies beneath! New carpet and hardwood floor installation can be fairly affordable and will increase the value of the home as well. If the home you are purchasing has bad carpets you could most likely have them installed in one day, likely before you occupy the home.

• Pop it like a soda can! There is a new trend happening on Denver and Boulder with buyers purchasing homes with the intention of immediately popping its top or putting and addition on it. This is especially true in older neighborhoods. Most of the time this expense is packaged into the initial financing of the home.

• That house is a full on Monet! Siding and exterior issues of a home can be a bit more challenging than some homeowners might think. So even if the house looks good from far away getting an up close look at the exterior is needed.  Because after all, you can always paint or get new shutters, but a lot of the time in order to do that you will find other repairs that need to be done first.

• Demolition fever!  Knocking down walls is not always an option, like you see on HGTV, but remodeling a kitchen or bathroom is. It is also important to remember all projects should be permitted and done by licensed contractors! (Half-a$$ improvements can hurt the value of your home at resale.)

• Walk into the light! Adding new window features, natural skylights or upgrading old windows to energy efficient ones can transform any room by letting new light into an old dark space and increase value!