Renovations, remodel and updates! To be or not to be?

As we are nearing the third year of the worst recession or some would say depression, I was curious if renovating your home or doing updates to a home that is not your “forever home”  is dictated by your taste or with a view of resale in mind?

What do you think?

Let me tell you a little bit of my own experience. In 2006, at the very beginning of the bad housing market in Florida, we put our home on the market. Personally, we thought the price our realtor’s told us was too high, and during the realtor showcase, the majority of the people said lower it $30,000 for a quicker sale. Never the less, we thought we did everything right, our realtor’s were new to the business and in many ways that was a good thing because they were fresh with ideas. We had the house staged even before the house was listed and we did everything the stagger recommended, from painting the front door a new color to changing the furniture arrangement. We had professional photos taken, and they looked beautiful! We even left all of our furniture in the house after we purchased our new home, just to help it show better.

The house sat on the market for 18 months before it finally sold and I am told we were lucky! We certainly did not feel like it. But we were more fortunate than most in that we could afford to keep both houses although not without sacrifices.

The house we live in now could or could not be our “forever” house, who knows. When we purchased it, it was way overpriced and really did not need any immediate work. Good thing, because being a two house family we did not have the money anyway! A coat of fresh paint and that was it. Anything else we wanted to do would have to wait.

Recently though, this issues has come up because we are having repairs done to the house because of a terrible Nor’easter. And like everything in life, when you change one thing there is something else that needs to be done to work with that project, and so on and so on. Or you decide the the time is ripe to make some changes while the whole house is in disarray.

So I wonder as I compile my file of wants, am I looking at something that is trendy or that is “over” or something that is going to come back later to haunt us?

So far we have had the floors in the entire house sanded and stained. Because of that we decided to have the cabinets painted. When they painted the ceiling in the entire house we thought it was a great time to get crown molding in the family room and hall. When they change the granite in the kitchen we are going to take part of the leftover granite and have it put in the guest bath and the list goes on. Some days it feels like we are building a new house.

I will share the progress as we move along on this adventure.