How much to spend on furniture as percentage of home price?
dandylandy
12 years ago
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12 years agolast modified: 9 years agolazy_gardens
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How much did you spend to get to a sale?
Comments (7)Isn't it only tax deductible if your have to pay a capital gains tax on the sale of the house? Not many have to do that anymore. Jeff, we spent about $6000 fixing up our $150,000 house to sell about a year ago. It hasn't sold yet. Things we did included removing wallpaper that we had grumpily lived with for 12 years, texturing the walls and painting where the wallpaper irregularly pulled off the skim coat of plaster. (This is why we had lived with it - we wanted it replastered and had no place to live while all that work was done.) We repainted two of the three bedrooms and the bath, touched up the third bedroom. We scrubbed, primed, and painted the basement cement walls, repaired the stair treads and put down new vinyl tile and aluminum stairnose going down the basement stairs. We installed laminate wallboard over the peeling wallpaper in the basement stairwell. We also had a small crack in the basement wall repaired with high-pressure urethane injection. We had the bathroom ceiling repaired (we had lived with stains and some gaping around the new heater/vent fan. We had the hardwood floors refinished. There is a built-in shelf in the dining area of the living room that was pure 1950 - scalloped trim and chipping white paint. The built-in is on a piano hinge and is the door to a cedar closet that is situated in the stairwell going down to the basement. We had the built-in removed and remade with oak, which I stained and polyurethaned. There is a stairway going up to a room above the garage near the dining area. We had the top of the wall cut-out for the stairs topped with oak, and oak trim put on the newel post at the bottom. I also had a new floor put into the front closet and I tiled that with the same vinyl from the basement stairs. We also painted the stairwell between the house and the garage, and tiled those stairs. We had the trim on the door to the back yard from the garage replaced and painted. We put a new storm door on the back door from the house to the back yard. We painted all four exterior doors and the garage door. Most of the work was done by neighbors we hired, since I cannot do hard labor anymore (joint problems) and DH was busy at work and not that handy. I painted doors and stained and urethaned wood, bought supplies, and supervised. BTW, the house started out at $165,000. I did FSBO for five months before we had a realtor take over and not one realtor showed the house to a client when it was FSBO and in the MLS. It gets shown occasionally now, but the market here has been almost frozen, not just slow....See MoreHow much should one spend on a new kitchen
Comments (2)That is a really tough question with no definitive answer. How much you spend depends so much on what part of the country you are in and what you are having done. There is a big difference between re-doing your counter tops and adding a backsplash vs. tearing down load-bearing walls and adding onto a home. In the first case, you can easily do a kitchen update for less than 10% but if you are doing anything major with structural changes, you are going to be over the 10% mark. I think for anything major, there is a baseline of what that costs, regardless of the value of the house so as a house's value increases, perhaps you are more likely to be able to do a renovation for 10-15%. For example if your house is worth $750k, sure, maybe you can do some major renovations for $75k and be at the 10% mark. Whereas, if your house is worth $150k, and you do something major, it is still going to cost a minimum of $30k, which would be 20% in the case of the less expensive house. All that to say, we spent a lot on our kitchen remodel, probably 25-30% of its value. It was however a major renovation/addition - adding approximately 14 x 16 feet of space on two levels, and a screen porch too. That being said, we don't think we will ever "get our money out of it" and we knew this going into it. But we didn't do it for resale - we did it for ourselves and intend to enjoy it for many years to come....See MoreHow much did you spend on backsplash tiles?
Comments (17)Antiquesilver - thanks so much, it feels good to be back ;) I had to take a break because it was getting increasingly hard to know how off our project was at the time and to stay enmeshed in reno talk. I loved seeing the FKB recently and recognizing many names. Luckily, we have been able to pick up from where we left off and much of the work on our end was already done. The tile, paint colors and counters were about all we need to worry about this time. Most everything else is already on our premises, lol. The tough part will be to dig out each element from all the collection of boxes all over our house. We had to replace our family bath's faucet and wanted to use the one bought for the master bath since it was just sitting around. Turns out, we had to buy another one because we could not find the mbth faucet. It has been another year or so and we still haven't found it. Our house will seem so spacious when it all gets installed and sorted out! Gsciencechick - I know the tiles you mean. I saw similar in HD for a contractor I am working with to help flip a house. I could not believe that the "Big Boxes" carried them and at such good prices. That is a great way to add bang for the buck! I will be getting the black accents from HD & Lowes and that will mean fewer pricey tiles. I woke up today and told myself to stop looking for tiles. We found the ones we really want and the $350 for the border accents may be crazy, but in the grand scheme of things, $350 is not so bad for what is admittedly a splurge. The field tiles in lavender only come out to $200 and cover a lot of space. They are not really a splurge since the tab is not that high. I know in my heart I could not replicate the look with anything less. It is not for lack of trying either. I was afraid dh would choke when he heard the amount, but he asked how much we'd save with something else, and when he heard it would be $100-150 or so, he said we should go for the ones we both like better since in time, that difference will seem petty. I guess there are some things one can compromise on such a single french door, not having a front porch added, fewer (but larger) skylights, carpet instead of fixing hardwood floors in master bedroom after extending, etc, but some we shouldn't, like cheaper tiles and counters (mid-range, which is our only other "splurge"). The other stuff we chose to do without cost much more than these items' upcharges. It is work to find the balance of saving money yet still making going through this all worthwhile. We technically could save more, but if we are going to spend over $150k to get the total project done and end up looking at it as ALL a compromise, then why bother? The other things we saved on will not impact our overall enjoyment by very much. I am just so grateful we are back to doing it before too long! With so many people losing their homes, doing any of this is a splurge....See MoreHow much money would you spend?
Comments (35)We will be moving next year and this is a discussion we're having. Like pal and chispa, we'll have a budget--and the price of the home plus necessary improvements has to fit in that budget. Looking at houses on-line, there are some I immediately start adding numbers on--flooring, painting, new kitchen. I'd rather buy a house that needed those things and was priced accordingly, though--especially the kitchen. For selling purposes, keeping this same concept in mind, we'll be repainting most of the house before listing it--Shaker Beige. I don't want people thinking "Oh--I have to paint that." Maybe they'll hate Shaker Beige and prefer a grey, but I figure beige won't keep people from looking at it (the purple/green in one room and deep teal in the other might--which is why we're painting those bedrooms). Our bathroom/kitchen/floor/lighting choices are all very neutral--I hope noone looks at ours and thinks "I'd have to spend $60,000 before I could even move in"...See Moreandreadeg
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