How to add value to your home: Part 3 (Popular home renovations)

Popular home renovations

Once you’ve established your home's needs, you can look at individual rooms, and you may improve them to suit your purposes better. Generally, the most popular methods of adding value to your home are renovating your kitchen or bathroom or adding square footage.

Kitchen

The kitchen is an essential element of the home, and out of all the rooms, it serves the widest variety of functions. Not only is it where you store and prepare food, it also serves as a gathering place, a visual focal point in the home, and a stage for entertaining guests and family members. 

Opening up the space within a kitchen is often a surefire method of adding value. For an easy and classic kitchen renovation project, look for ways to open the room to create an inviting space. Additionally, looking for ways to add practical value, such as storage space.

Bathroom

After the kitchen, the bathrooms are huge selling points within a home. Whereas the kitchen is more public and oriented around entertainment, health, and community, the bathroom is private, intimate, and secluded. 

However, based on your needs, the bathroom may be the best place to start. For example, if you’re not someone who hosts a lot or prefers cooking, but you have overnight guests or even need a safe place to relax and prepare yourself, starting with the bathroom is reasonable. 

In fact, we recommend starting with the master bathroom if you can only choose one for no reason other than where you will spend your time, and you’re the first person who needs to love the home.

Remember, it’s about figuring out how you need the home to function. There are thousands of possibilities when renovating a bathroom. The options are endless, from tile choice to counter and sink layout to color and texture. 

Adding square footage

Adding square footage to your home is the third major improvement you can make to add value. This comes last, not because it’s the least worthy option, but because it’s often the most expensive. However, finding creative ways to add square footage often has the biggest potential return on the principal value. Adding a bedroom or bathroom is the easiest way to find new space. 

For example, we had a 4 bedroom 2 bathroom house, which isn’t very common today. The second bathroom was a very large jack-and-jill bathroom. We split the bathroom down the middle to create 2 separate bathrooms, transforming it into a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom home, substantially increasing the selling price. Even though the two bathrooms were small, creating an extra bathroom in the house was more than worth it.