At the end of next week we will have been in our home a whole year! That’s a whole year of mortgage repayments and being a responsible adult! This isn’t our forever home, but we do want to make it a lovely home to live in and a home that will be ideal for another family’s first run on the property ladder when we sell it. We’ve started to make improvements to it already, and want to do lots more before we’re ready to sell.
What we’ve done so far to improve our home:
Kitchen: Ripped up the lino in the kitchen and replaced it with gorgeous printed vinyl tiles, as well as moving some cupboards around to fit a dishwasher in, and then replacing the cooker and counter tops and tiled the walls behind the cooker and sink. We swapped the dated strip light with angled lights. We also redecorated the walls and replaced two wooden frames single glazed window frames with a heat conserving uPvc windows.
Carpets: Before we brought the property it was rented to tenants and hadn’t much tlc. We replaced the hall, stairs, living room and playroom carpets with a thick light grey carpet with extra deep underlay for added warmth. Before the hallway didn’t have any underlay at all, which was a bit odd! The carpet looks great but is also easily cleaned in case of any mishaps!
What we plan to do before we sell:
- Replace the carpets and windows in the bedrooms.
- Plaster the hallway and bedrooms so they look more modern
- Replace the roof (we will share half this cost with the freeholder, hurrah!)
- Replace the wooden door for a more secure reinforced door with double glazed panels.
- Refit the bathroom completely
I’m sure other things will crop up whilst we’re here too. Below are a few more ideas of ways to add value to your home, a loft conversion would be great to do in our home as we have two lofts, one of which is pretty big!
The #SagaHomeImprovements campaign has been set up to help people release some equity and improve the value of their home, you can find out more here. When surveyed 61% of people who released equity were planning on using the money directly on their home.
Saga are also running a giveaway for two tickets to the Ideal Home Show in Manchester and you can enter here, the competition ends on April 30th
Post written in association with Saga, all words and opinions are my own.
This is great we could really do with releasing some equity to improve our house off to investigate further!
This is really interesting and loads of useful information to consider here. Especially how converting the garage can really add value. Not something I had considered before.
This is so handy to know. I’ve been putting off doing things around our house as we are potentially going to be renting it out when we eventually find a house we love and want to move into but this kind of puts into perspective both the resale value of the house and the rent value too. Great post, thanks lovely x
This is really interesting! We think our house has increased in value but we’ve not done much to it yet. Bathrooms are next on the list! xx
We’re forever doing DIY at our house, so good to know some of it is adding value. Honestly one day we’ll have a completely finished house!
Stevie x
This is so interesting. We’re currently debating having a loft conversion added so it’s good to know it can add value!
Some really great info here. We have our house on the market at the moment and I never thought about some of these things before we listed it!