Making a house a home is a fulfilling task, but making your home cozy could be a horrible financial misstep. As a homeowner, there are specific responsibilities like taking time to bundle home and car insurance, but maintenance and styling matter just as much as paperwork.
When it comes to where we live, we all want the latest trends, but could keeping up now potentially set us back later?
What Home Improvements Don’t Add Value?
Whether you are currently looking to sell your home or just to make your place more aesthetically pleasing, you should be mindful of what changes will help grow the value of your home.
Homeowners will often make exterior and interior decor choices that can both harm a home’s value, drive up insurance premiums, and make the property difficult to sell.
A list of common areas where homeowners choose trends that decrease their home’s value include:
- Extensive and type-specific landscaping: The upkeep for extensive landscape can be a turn-off to prospective buyers, and gardens don’t often add resale value to a home.
- Solar panel installation: Homeowners think what they spend on installing solar panels will come back to them tenfold, but instead they find the only perk is savings on the electrical bill.
- In-ground swimming pools or hot tubs: Who wouldn’t want a luxury amenity like a pool? It turns out that having a pool isn’t on many homebuyers’ wish lists. Pools are high maintenance and costly. In addition to that, if they are not installed correctly, they can cause significant structural damage to property.
- Creating a sunroom: This is another investment that has the potential to turn once enthusiastic homeowners sour. Sunrooms are beautiful but can be seen as wasted or unusable space when looking to resell.
- Tiled flooring: Tile floors seem to be a coastal trend that some inland designers are inspired to emulate. While new tile can look stunning, it often doesn’t age well, and cleaning the grout may become tedious.
- Large showers with no tubs: Pictures can make grand showers look luxurious, but not having a tub could make a considerable difference in appraisals.
- Grand chandeliers: What looks good is often a preference, but chandeliers can cause costly structural catastrophes if not installed right.
- Overuse of wallpaper or textured spaces: Too much design can end up backfiring on homeowners. Creating “moments” in a home can be a fun task, but needing to remove a lot of tailored plans isn’t a task many are eager to sign up for.
- Bold paint colors: Deep earthy tones and sultry hues are taking over, but covering them up can be costly and complex.
- Creating an open concept: In recent years, open concepts have been sought after but can be hard to create. Open concepts limit furniture and other design approaches.
- Knocking down walls to create a larger room: One grand bedroom, closet, bathroom, or living room may seem desirable, but for larger families, they are big turn-offs that can depreciate your home value.
Often these designs seem like smart choices, but the return on the investment comes up short.
The best remodeling ideas come from what will universally upgrade a resident’s quality of life, help reduce monthly costs, and add indisputable value.
You should love any home improvements you make, but just because you prefer a particular design doesn’t make it the most profitable.
Designing a home to a trend is fickle because trends can change, making the time and money you spend easily wasted. A simple solution to keep up with trends while making your house your home is to consider temporary design methods to complete your aesthetic.
Using peel-and-stick tiles, removable wallpaper, proper anchors when using nails, and leaning or free-standing statement pieces to accent a room make resetting a home for selling easy.
While you create your dream looks, also consider the durability of your design and the materials you choose. Sometimes the damage done because of design choices doesn’t show right away.
Attempting a design trend without having the education to execute correctly can cause more than design fails. You especially want to avoid any trends that are unforgiving or call attention to your home’s age.
What Can Make A Home Unsellable?
While DIY is the top of all trends dominating the interior design world, some things are better suited for professionals. You might be surprised, but by asking a local realtor, you’ll find that more is capable of rendering a house unsellable than what you think.
It can be hard making sense of the real estate market as a non-agent, but the value of a home is more than what meets the eye. Designing a space in both structural changes and decor that are attractive to you is subjective and can turn off potential buyers.
Though furniture and decor can be quick and effortless fixes, the damage or lost potential buyers due to bad trends are not as quickly repaired.
Many trends may look good while they’re up, but they are generally not known for their prospective longevity.
Be wary of trends that have the inherent ability to cause structural damage. Trend traits to take with caution include:
- Hard-to-reach places: Any design feature that is challenging to clean due to texture or placement can cause unwarranted smells and even bug infestations.
- Mold traps: Any design feature that could potentially trap or create excess moisture is an ultimate no-no. Water damage can spread to multiple parts of a home, cause mold, and in severe cases, need complete demolition.
- Heavy or poorly structured features: When a part could cause strain on a structure, chances are it’s not the best design choice. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have to patch fallen drywall, but handing something wrong could literally bring the house down.
- Complicated electrical wiring: If a feature requires complex electrical wiring or knowledge, you should be extremely careful and hire a professional electrician. Attempting to overcrowd your wiring or DIY electrical jobs could result in residential fires costing thousands of dollars.
Making a House a Home Isn’t Easy
Love it or hate it, owning a home is an investment, and what you do as a homeowner either helps or hurts it. However long you plan to live in your home, it should be suitable for you, but financially your home should help you obtain wealth.
So even if you’re planning to design your forever home, you should consider these warnings to avoid costly repairs and a depreciated home value.
About the Author:
Danielle Beck-Hunter writes and researches for the auto insurance site, BuyAutoInsurance.com. Danielle became a homeowner at a young age and has worked with various interior design companies and clients.