How to wreck your home value?

I went to another home today. From the outside it was a typical home, but from the inside, I just couldn’t figure out how an owner could mess up his home so bad. There are some things you must think through, or your home will end up a foreclosure.

I opened the door. The kitchen didn’t look too bad compared to other foreclosures I’ve seen in the area. I look around to find a sign on the kitchen door. “Don’t trust self, trust god.” Sometimes being a real estate appraiser is sad. If you think through some of this stuff, your home will not end up a foreclosure. Let me go through some of the things this home owner did to cause the home to become a foreclosure.

The original home offered a living room that extended the front of the home. To the side and the back of the home, there were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a porch. The laundry room was located on the porch. This is typical for older homes. Now this is what the owner did and this is what you should not do.

They split the living room in two to make an additional bedroom on one side of the living room. As a result, the bedroom did not offer a closet and the light switch was located on the other side of the room. The light switch was located on the other side of the doorway so that you’d have to walk all the way through the bedroom in the dark to get to the light switch. A closet was purchased from the local store and placed in the corner of the room. What’s wrong with this? First, if you’re remodeling, think these things through so that you have a light switch next to the entry door and that you have a real closet. A closet and a window are usually used to identify whether or not the room can be classified as a bedroom or not. This could be extremely important to your home value. As a result of adding the bedroom to half of the living room, the living room is now too small for typical furniture. This made the living room function as an entry with no real use of the square footage.

A wall was removed from one of the bedrooms to create a larger dining room, but the closet was left in the dining room. The closet looked like a bedroom closet. This may not affect the value, but what if you were thinking of buying this home and there were another 50 homes in the area that offered functional floor plans with useable living rooms, functional dining rooms without bedroom closets in the incorrect place and bedrooms with no permanent closet space. Now let’s move on to the next issue.

In the process of remodeling, the laundry room that is located in the covered porch was expanded, but never finished. There was additional square footage added to the home, but it is unfinished. It is always better to never start a project unless you plan to finish it. This area did not offer proper permit history, either. This is a huge problem for bank financing. The bank will not want to give you the money to refinance or buy a home unless the home offers the proper permits to install these improvements. Do not do any improvements yourself unless you get the proper permit history and unless you plan to finish it.

Do you think the owner stopped there? Not likely, read further.

It was common for this area to offer basements. In the process of remodeling, the owner covered up the stairs and created a deep crawl space with limited access to the basement. If you have internal stairs to the basement, don’t cover them up. In most cases, you’ll do nothing but decrease the value of your home, as some value will usually be given to an unfinished basement.

Now the next thing they did you should never do.

The back porch addition did not offer the correct crawl space height for fixing issues with pluming, electrical, etc. This is a huge problem. The owner just prevented the home from FHA financing and will prevent home inspectors from properly inspecting the home. Make sure that you have proper crawl space height for your new addition (18” is usually recommended, but if you can make a larger crawl space, do.

So the next time you make home improvements, think through these improvements to make sure that they are truly improvements, or they will decrease your home value, cause your home not to sell, making you the next person to give your house back to the bank.