Upgrade your investment

Make your home a more pleasant place to live, and then you can profit from it when it’s time to sell. How much to spend on renovating depends on the value of your home.

“You’ll always get your money back if you spend it in the right places,” says real estate maven Barbara Corcoran, who now dispenses advice on “The Today Show” after selling for $70 million the company she started with a $1,000 loan. Her newest book, “Nextville: Amazing Places to Live the Rest of Your Life” (Springboard Press, $24.99), is due out in April.

Home value: $250,000
Amount to lay out: $10,000 to $20,000


Cosmetic: Make minor improvements. Paint the front door and trim to make a great first impression. Do a total interior paint job in a light, pale color, but not white (too stark). Pale colors enlarge the space, and you want your place to look as spacious as possible.
Structural: Replace the door if warped, and the bell if it doesn’t work. If the roof has any flaws, fix them. Make sure there are no water marks on ceilings. People see those and assume the worst.

Landscaping: What’s closest to the house is most important. People buy light-colored houses and will pay more for them. Trim down bushes near windows and fill in any bald spots.

Home value: $500,000
Amount to lay out: $20,000 to $50,000

Cosmetic:Repaint everything. Repaint and or refurbish doors and/or hardware on the front kitchen cabinets. Resurface floors, re-carpet where necessary, and make it look like a fresh new home.

Structural: Go to a new development with homes more expensive than yours and see what the latest and greatest appliances are. Buy the least pricey one, like an oversized stainless-steel refrigerator. Do more if you have the budget.

Landscaping: Splurge a little more on the landscaping; keep things low but lush near windows.

Home value: $1 million+
Amount to lay out: $30,000 to $100,000

Cosmetic: Do a quality paint job, upgrade kitchen cabinet improvements (replace hardware, doors), refinish wood floors, re-carpet what’s worn or too fashion-forward.

Structural: Splurge on luxuries that flatter egos; improve kitchen, baths. Put in new countertops and replace appliances, even if only 3 or 4 years old. In baths, use sleek ceramic tile that looks expensive (but doesn’t have to be), free-standing tubs with water features, multi-head showers with frame-less glass enclosures and a flat-screen TV if there’s wall space.

Landscaping: Spend the rest of your budget on healthy foliage and the best landscaping you can get.

For every budget:

-Get rid of at least a third of your stuff, from knickknacks to furnishings, especially expensive objects and art. Pay to have it packed up and stored if you have to.
- Scrub your house from top to bottom. Also clean all the windows. For the best results, hire a service.

- Increase the wattage of every lamp in your home. Replace dark lampshades with light ones that let light shine through.

- Remove heavy drapes, replace all the shower curtains and buy new towels.

- Make sure all changes or improvements you make are decoratively neutral.

Home Library: Pages to Turn to For Guidance

To make sure a project will give you the returns you want, check out Remodeling Magazine’s annual Cost vs. Value Report, which features information on the 29 most popular projects (download it for free at http://www.costvsvalue.com/). And check out these tomes, which are full of ideas that will help you figure out what to do, whom to hire and how much to spend.

“Remodeling on the Money; 15 Innovative Projects Designed to Add Value to Your Home” by Alan J. Heavens (Kaplan Publishing, $19.95) Most people don’t want to take on a renovation themselves, but if you do, you should know your options, the pitfalls and what to expect. This guidebook takes an extensive look at the 15 most common home-improvement projects–from bathrooms to basements, to replacing windows and adding decks and patios. You can learn how to do everything here.

“What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home” by Alan J. Heavens (Dearborn Trade Publishing, $18.95) Consider the following:

- Contractors should not be inflexible to your requests, but often are. Why?

- Things can still go wrong with the easiest renovation-painting.

- Low-flow toilets can take two or three flushes to rid of the same waste an older, 3.5-gallon model handles in one flush. … If you’re a novice, the secrets and tricks of the trade are here on every aspect of the process, from hiring contractors to controlling your budget and schedule. If you’re a pro, this book will remind you of all the things you forgot.

“Architectural Inspiration” by Richard Skinulis & Peter Christopher (The Boston Mills Press, $79.95) What should you use on your floors, walls, ceilings and countertops? What about lighting, hardware, cabinets and plumbing fixtures? You can learn about all of them in great detail in this hefty, comprehensive, gorgeously illustrated tome that delivers what its tagline promises: “styles, details & sources.” Save yourself the time of running from store to store or surfing the Web blind; this is one of the most thorough and well-researched source books on products and materials on the market.

© 2008, Chicago Tribune.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.