When you’re buying a home, you might expect that it’s going to come with some costs even after the purchase agreement is through, the mortgage is settled, and you’ve moved in. However, while you might be willing to spend on decorating, some renovating, and even some repair work, you want to make sure that you’re not buying a house that turns into a money pit, and an endless project that’s always asking for more. As such, here are a few ideas on how you can avoid that.
Leave your emotions at the door
It’s hard to try and stay objective when you’re looking at a home. It’s a purchase that’s going to have such an effect on your lifestyle and quality of life, it’s only natural to get excited about the prospect of a home that you really like the look of. However, you need to keep a cool head and look with an analytical eye when you’re going through a property. Otherwise, your heart can lead to you making decisions that your head would probably object to if you had the opportunity to use it. There’s nothing wrong with falling in love with a house, but only after you’re sure that it meets your standards.
Take the time to go through the home carefully, inspect it with your eye, and try to take the time to get a good look at everything that’s inside. You might even want to take pictures if you have permission. The purpose here is to make sure that you’re fully considering each room, how they meet your needs, and what you might need to change. This way, you can later think about all of the changes you might want to make, including potential repairs that you have spotted. Tallying up these costs, you can get a good idea of the post-purchase price that you’re looking at.
Spend extra time in the basement
A professional is going to be able to help you look at this part of the home even more closely. However, before you even decide it’s worth getting to that stage, you should make sure to check the basement or whatever area is under the home. These are the spots that are prone to the most problems with dampness, foundation issues and more. If you spot any water leaks, if there is a strong musty smell or any cracks in the walls, these are red flags you should ask about. These can be some of the most expensive problems of all to fix, so you have to be sure that you’re willing to pay for them. In most cases, you may just want to walk away.
Know what’s lurking under the surface
Typically, the most costly home repairs come as a result of not knowing enough about the property that you’re trying to buy. This is precisely the kind of situation that a home survey is supposed to help you avoid. The seller’s valuation does not take into account how the value of a property should be affected by wet or dry rot, roofing problems, foundation damage or otherwise, because they do not look that far into the property. As such, you’re going to need your own professional to take a closer look at the home and see what issues might be lurking understand. You might be able to cover these costs by getting the seller to lower the asking price, too.
Looking at the property itself is where most of your focus should go. However, you can get some good ideas on what to expect from it by taking a look at the neighbourhood as well. First of all, look at the homes of the immediate next-door neighbours, or the closest neighbours. Visible issues affecting their property, like roof damage, moss, overgrown gardens, and the like, might end up affecting the property beside them as well. If you’re thinking about the potential resale value and the home as an investment, then your neighbours can devalue your home if you’re not careful as well. Remember, it’s not just the property that you’re buying, it’s the location that it is in, too.
Know your renovation plans before you move in
The home might not need too much in the way of vital repairs. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have plans to update it. If you’re renovating a home, especially renovating an old home, then you need to make sure that you have a plan on how, exactly, you’re going to do it. Consider your overall budget for this renovation, and look at the changes that you want to make in the home. Consider those that are the highest priority and get them priced out first, whether you need to consider the costs of materials and tools to DIY it, or you need an estimate from a contractor.
You might be willing to tolerate some repairs and renovations, but one way to help keep the costs of repairs down is to have a good idea of what DIY work you’re willing to do. Of course, there are some kinds of work that you simply should not do without the right qualifications, such as plumbing and electrics. Drywall repairs and some damp material replacements might be easy enough for you to handle on your own. Be aware of what you’re able to DIY and how much time you’re going to be able to spend fixing up the home to avoid the costs of having to hire contractors for every little thing. Just try to avoid overestimating how much work you’re actually willing to do.
Money pits are all too common on the housing market. Sometimes buyers end up in them out of their own negligence or poor planning, but you have to beware sellers and agents willing to mislead you, as well. With the tips above, you can make sure you land in the right property for you.
The sun begins to warm during spring, and the trees start to blossom, setting a beautiful stage for your home to stand out and attract potential buyers’ attention. Taking advantage of the warm weather, you can elevate your home’s façade, landscaping, and front entry. During spring, the houses to buy may be few, increasing the housing demand.
The increased demand may increase home prices, with average homes also receiving competing offers. Most homes come at high price ranges during the spring market, making it easy to find an upgrade. Below are reasons to sell your house in spring.
1. The demand from homebuyers is high
Thanks to the spring’s warm weather, the market experiences a buyer’s influx competing for the available listings. Many homebuyers, mainly families, begin to look for their dream homes because it’s a good time to move with school-going children. In spring, selling a house means getting more money from your sale since more buyers will fight to have the limited homes available. During this season, the real estate demand remains high and continues to be impacted by low inventory levels.
2. It’s an excellent way to use your home equity
Home equity is your home’s appraised value less mortgage and other loans. As home values continue to increase, the homeowner’s equity increases. This results in savings that grow when you still own the house and can be used for greater ambitions like financing your next dream home or clearing your mortgage and other loans.
Image: Shutterstock
3. Curb appeal is at its peak
The spring’s warm weather boosts your curb appeal by ensuring the outdoors are filled with green grass, blooming flowers, and leafy greens, making your home look its best. Improved curb appeal not only attracts potential buyers but also increases your home’s value, boosting return on investment and making spring an excellent time to sell.
4. You may sell your home for more
The spring is primarily dominated by a seller’s market, making it a good time to sell your house. This gives the seller the chance to price their house as they deem fit while maximizing profits and selling their homes faster. During a seller’s market, bidding wars may arise, and buyers may end up competing among themselves.
5. It’s an excellent time to move
Selling your home in spring means that you can move without worrying about fighting snow, bitterly cold temperatures, and ice when moving to your new home. Since springtime is usually warm, overheating won’t be a problem, making moving fun and enjoyable. If you want to beat the heat and the cold when moving, then spring is the ideal time to move.
Endnote
The decision to sell a house is usually personal and can be impacted by several factors. While at times you may have to sell based on what works for you, even if it means missing out on favourable deals, consider listing your house for sale in spring to take advantage of potentially high prices and a large pool of buyers.
Consciously staging your home to appeal to the widest audience makes financial sense. However, our emotional side can overpower our sense of logic when selling the family home. We urge you to persevere and consider ditching the dated family heirlooms, or at least packing them away and focusing on our list of budget design trends that will help sell your home in 2022.
You might love bold pops of colour or appealing wallpaper, but realtors say this can be off-putting for potential buyers. Not only might the color not mesh with their sense of style or soft furnishings, but it also makes it more difficult for buyers to picture themselves living in your space.
You don’t need to spend too much on renovating your home if you use this selling a home checklist. However, our first suggestion is to repaint your house in neutral colors. The aim is to create a cohesive look throughout your house that will undoubtedly help sell your home in 2022.
Mirrors
You can use mirrors to make a room look larger, longer or draw attention away from less desirable locations. Mirrors can bounce sunbeams from a window into a room with poor natural light, or be used as a frame for a lovely scene such as a cluster of plants and flowers.
We recommend scouring charity shops, flea markets, and garage sales for distinctive mirrors or picture frames that can be updated for only a few extra dollars. The best part is that you can take them with you when you move.
In 2022, metallic lighting will be a popular interior design trend. Get rid of any old fixtures that age your home and update the space with large, contemporary light fixtures in silver, bronze, or shades of gold. Keep within budget by creating dramatic appeal with stylish but straightforward fixtures from IKEA or other big box stores.
Indoor Plants
We are still spending more time indoors than we ever previously imagined. As a result, one of the biggest interior design trends for 2022 will be the addition of even more houseplants.
Whether you prefer the limited emotional investment of a succulent garden or the enormous leaves of philodendrons reminding you of the tropics, houseplants are here in a big way. Consider purchasing pots that match your interiors first and then choosing amongst these plants that are relatively low maintenance:
Are you still working on your laptop from the dining room table? Is your guest room overflowing with boxes and also used for ironing and storage? It’s time to fine tune these multifunctional spaces in your home and ensure potential buyers can look beyond any flaws. Instead, you want them to focus on the home office nook or the versatility of a room.
If you want to get top dollar for your house once you put it on the market, it is likely worth investing your time and energy into updating the interiors to appeal to the masses. Many of the design trends on our list can be swiftly packed to take with you, so you can continue to relish them in your next abode.
Planning to repurpose an old home? Doing an entire home renovation or just a section is no easy feat but can be rewarding in the end, whether you plan to flip the house later or live there with family.
While every home is bound to experience wear and tear at some point, remodelling the right way can make a house last for years without any extra retouches. Incorporate these nine tips into your renovation to get the best out of the project.
Have a Plan
The number one mistake most people make when renovating their homes is not having a clear plan of action from the get-go. This results in time wastage among other costly mistakes down the road that could’ve been easily avoided.
A plan doesn’t mean everything should be figured out, but you do need the basics. Your plan should include aspects such as whether you need to hire professionals to help with the work and who you’ve got booked, when each part of the work will be undertaken (are you tackling things room by room, or all at once?), any tools you need to acquire for the job, details of an affordable skip hire company to take care of the rubbish and plans you have for the interior design colour and style.
Having a plan makes the process stress-free, so you can enjoy the project. Remember you don’t need to hatch the entire plan at once and can amend it as you need to, but it will help you be more organised to have a plan from the outset.
This is the first step of the renovation, and it involves examining all the house systems before you can begin any construction. The main purpose of this exercise is to address any pre-existing issues within the home before painting or adding wallpapers.
For an accurate picture, you’ll need a house inspector to assess the home’s existing systems. These include problems within the plumbing system, electrical system, or heating. Once the groundwork is over, you can focus on more substantial renovation projects without worry.
Mix the Old and New
Renovating a home involves more than just buying new stuff and placing it inside the home to look good. The right balance comes from having new, must-have pieces and old to complement each other.
So, before getting rid of the old items that may seem invaluable to you, think of how you can mix them up with new objects for a special touch. You’ll need to channel your inner style here and bring back sentimental pieces, especially those old family heirlooms.
Besides, having a blend of old and new items is a creative way of making your house suitable for all occasions – formal and informal.
Consider all-round Renovation
Most people who plan their renovations only focus on the three primary areas – the living room, bedroom, and kitchen. However, renovating a home means renovating all available spaces inside the home.
The hallway, for example, is one of the central areas for footfall and traffic, but still often the most ignored places during a renovation. An all-inclusive renovation ensures the outcome is uniform since all areas get some special work done on them.
Just make sure this remodelling is within your budget since more renovations cost more money.
Paint
Paint is an underestimated tool when renovating a house. If you ask most interior designers what the first step to renovating is, they’ll tell you to repaint your house. Why is this? Paint does more than add colour to a home. It can amplify a room and make it look larger, highlight a specific area inside the home and create a calming ambiance.
What’s more, painting doesn’t have to be done on the walls alone. Areas such as the ceiling look the best with a fresh coat while some of the old furniture could benefit from a paint job too. Just make sure not to limit yourself to solid paint colours, and instead explore varying patterns, gradients, and textures to keep things interesting.
The best part about painting is you don’t require any professional assistance but just a few tutorials online, and you can DIY.
This is one of the less talked about renovation tips that actually makes a lot of sense. It implies that wrong proportions can make a home feel like it’s missing something even though it just got a do-over.
For this reason, items and especially the furniture in a home after renovation should be of a proportionate size to the house. This, however, doesn’t mean a small house should have numerous small pieces of furniture distributed across the entire place. Instead, proportionate means having the right size but still leaving enough room to move around.
For example, in a small house, having one large chair instead of a small cross-sectional seat in the house makes it more spacious and comfortable. Just make sure not to buy too big items again since they may occupy all the space. Use these room planning tools to help ensure you get the proportions right.
Utilize All Spaces Available
The secret to renovating an old home is making sure all the available unused spaces are utilized to the maximum. If you do an analysis of your old home, you’ll find there are gaps and spaces that could play key roles in designing a home.
Think about the space left between a kitchen cabinet and the wall or the empty space above your bookshelf. Although they may seem insignificant, such spaces could be converted to create more storage rooms in the house.
For example, the space between the cabinet and kitchen wall could be used as a place to store wine, spices, or cutting boards.
So, if you’re planning to get new furniture for your home as part of the renovation, ensure to utilize all the dead spaces around.
Trends are like a fresh breath of air because they give old designs a new twist but they never seem to last that long. If you’re on Instagram, Pinterest, or follow interior décor magazines, you probably come across many new trends all of which catch your attention.
However, one thing about momentary trends is they always end up losing taste and so you may be permanently stuck with designs you hate. It is especially painful if you paid an arm and a foot for the said pieces since you’ll have to get rid of them at a throwaway price.
The safest way to keep up with trends is going for timeless pieces, especially those that are expensive and can’t be swapped easily. Afterwards, you can experiment with the different types of trends that come and go with smaller pieces that are easily swappable and won’t be missed.
Accessories always come last because they’re meant to complement the already existing style and colours. Since they’re the icing on the cake, accessories need not be too expensive but instead thoughtful pieces to give your home that finishing touch.
The type of interior accessories you choose will largely be determined by the kind of vibe you want to set. Do you want your home to look elegant, cosy perhaps? The decision you make will influence the accessories you’ll get, whether artwork, decorative pillows, or vases among other items.
Only make sure that the colour scheme in your home is cohesive and remove any accessories that ruin the final image. Think critically about the accessories and the message they send before settling on one.
Conclusion
Renovating an old home is always an exciting experience since you never know how the finished product will look until the end. The best renovations are those that start with a basic plan of operation so each day can have its specific duties. Use these tips to execute the perfect renovation that will add value and style to your home.
If no man is an island, then no home is, either. No matter how static and enduring our homes can seem, they’re also dynamic entities, influenced by the world around them. You’ll notice this most intensely when needing to heat your home, or dealing with a leak, or trying to remedy frozen pipes in the winter.
While it’s important to consider the maintenance needs of your household and to keep up with it where appropriate, it’s also worth considering that sometimes, the task is a little above our pay grade. That is, of course, unless you have accredited skills in a chosen trade.
For most people, keeping emergency contacts in their address book can help them resolve an issue before the damage requires true recuperative work. Sure, you can easily just type in ‘X service near me,’ to Google should you need that, but it’s much more appropriate to vet those services ahead of time to find an approved source you can trust, especially at a time when you’re relaxed rather than needing immediate assistance.
Keeping an effective plumber in your address book is more than just a nice accessory to have when you’re thinking about renovating your space. For instance, searing for a ‘hot water plumber near me’ can be essential should you try to take that morning shower only to sing in falsetto’s thanks to how cold the water is, while at large, plumbing companies can also help you with leaks and emergency assistance where necessary too. Without this service in your address book, it’s easy to feel out of sorts should your plumbing fail to keep up with your needs.
A Security Specialist & Locksmith
We’ve all locked ourselves out of our houses at one time or another, to do so is almost comically ubiquitous. Yet it’ also true that when renovating or extending your house, after suffering a break in, or if just wanting to make sure you have every element planned out, a security specialist service (perhaps helping you maintain a proprietary security system you have in place), and a locksmith’s can help you retain your skills for some time to come.
An Emergency Gas Specialist
Emergency gas specialists can more readily identify and stop a leak, as well as install essential measures like carbon monoxide detectors. This is essential as carbon monoxide can be lethal and unfortunately, doesn’t have a smell. Gas specialists can also help you should you renovate the household, as well as make sure that certain speciality ovens are properly aligned with the gas network of the household. This approach can give you the peace of mind knowing that all installations have been made with care, and from now into the future you need not worry provided you keep up with the best and most reliable practice.
With this advice, you’re certain to keep all the essential services you need in your address book.
