The forecast for foreseeable future is a little dreary if you’re a home owner – diminishing house prices are causing a great concern for many individuals. Some property owners will actually experience negative equity shortly, if not already. Nonetheless, there are means to head off this problem. The Answer : to add value to your home. How to go about that? By giving your house a makeover. Do It Yourself / home improvements can add far greater value to your home than the actual cost of those improvements.

So where to start? A good place to start is to think about the least used rooms in your property. Maybe it’s a spare bedroom or adjoining garage. Taking down a wall can transform such a rarely used room into extra space for a living room or kitchen. Also take into account plumbing and electrics. A dimmer switch can change a bright, garish room into a warm, inviting living space – it’s just a dimmer switch, but showing such a pleasant ambience in your home makes the prospective home buyer feel more relaxed! Maybe your house doesn’t have a downstairs bathroom? Then get one installed where your utility room is – once more this can add a great deal of value to your house.

Possibly your 4 bedroomed house could be changed to 3 bedroom by ripping a wall down, and producing a much larger room. This may sound a little strange, but in reality larger rooms will hand you a better sale value, and quite often individuals use a 4th bedroom purely as a spare room (meaning it’s not really used or important) .

Next up is the garden. Is there a shed there? If not, think about installing one in the garden. Why is this of particular importance? Well, here is one place where you can keep all your gear that’s overloading up your garage / utility room / spare bedroom. Sheds encourage gardening also, and enthusiastic gardeners (read: your prospective house buyer) like a shed in their garden. And get into gardening yourself! If your garden’s been ignored, then mow the lawn, plant some flowers, cut the lawn edges. Also consider installing decking. Just providing a beverage to a potential buyer out in your stunning garden can really make the place sell itself – viewers feel comfortable in such surroundings – so your garden is very important to help raise the price of your property and help sell your home.

So where to look for some assistance? Look online. A home and garden directory like homeandgardenlistings.co.uk has all kinds of home and garden websites listed there : including a directory of bathroom fitters, directory of builders, directory of plumbers, electricians, directory of general furniture suppliers, directory of bedroom furniture and beds suppliers etc.

These are just a few introductory points on raising the value of your property in these difficult times, but hopefully this will get you thinking!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 6:09 am and is filed under Gardeners World, Home Improvement Hall, Universe Of Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.