As the years go by and your family grows and changes, your needs for your home also evolve. Does your home no longer offer the functional space and/or the amenities that fit your current lifestyle? If so, you may be wavering between whether to move or improve your home. Many people just assume moving would be the easier choice. Westside would like to help you make an informed decision by outlining some of the advantages remodeling offers that you may not have considered.
BEFORE
First of all, think about the community you live in. You may have developed close ties to your neighbors and your neighborhood and would hate to leave those familiar surroundings. The proximity of your home to your place of employment, local schools, churches, medical facilities and other services you have come to rely on is another consideration. These are all important connections that need not be disrupted if you remodel. The costs of moving are a big consideration. You will have the pressure of needing to sell your current home, plus paying the 6+/-% commission if you choose to go through a realtor (on a $200,000 home that is $12,000!). Additional closing costs can be another 2%. Then, when you finally locate the house you want to buy, once again you will have the closing costs and the expenses involved in financing a larger mortgage, plus a possible increase in property taxes. On top of that, there are the moving expenses. One of the biggest attractions of remodeling is that the money spent on moving expenses, closing costs and an agent’s commission will not be required, and you avoid the worry of whether or not your current home will sell.
AFTER
You may be surprised to learn how adaptable your home is to a renovation. According to Bob Sturgeon, “Sometimes it requires a new addition to give our clients the space they desire in their remodeled home. Other times, by removing interior walls and readjusting the layout, we have totally transformed our clients’ homes, providing them the larger spaces they needed within the existing footprint.” Remodeling can often increase the future resale value of your home, especially if the improvements increase living space. The biggest resale returns generally come from improvements that bring the house up to the value of other homes in your same area. Westside Remodeling has very detailed process in place to keep the disruptions of remodeling to a minimum. We would love to discuss our process with you and show you why our past clients don’t sell their homes and move. They keep coming back to us whenever their home needs to be updated to fit their ever changing lifestyle.
