Home Improvements That May Devalue Your Home

Making a few home improvements should normally be a sure fire way to increase the value of your home at resale time right? Wrong, not always. There are, in fact, some home improvements and home renovation projects that may make getting the selling price you want harder than had they not ever been implemented in the first place. Here are some home improvement projects to avoid.
Taste and Function Specific Kitchens

You are an avid amateur chef. You remodeled your kitchen and it now rather resembles the ones they use on Hells Kitchen, all stainless steel and professional equipment.

Personally you love it because it is so functional, but a potential buyer may be intimidated by it, especially if their culinary interests don't go far beyond making toast. You always want to appeal to the broadest range of buyers when selling any home and, if a potential buyer believes that it will cost them significant amounts of money to make changes to the remodeling initiatives you made, they may still make the offer, but it is likely to be for less than you wanted.

The same goes for bathrooms as well. Not everyone always dreamed of having a heart shaped tub the way you might have done...

Bright Paint Jobs

Most real estate brokers will tell you that giving your home a nice new coat of paint before you put it on the market is a good idea. But by new paint they mean a nice neutral color, not bright, bold shades that may intimidate some buyers. Save the bright red walls that looked so trendy on that home show for your next house.
Water Features

Added water features like in ground swimming pools, hot tubs or fountains may give you a lot of pleasure but, to some potential buyers, they can represent an extra expense and inconvenience they don't really want rather than an extra that they do. Once again, that will often cause them to offer a lower price because of the extra money they perceive that the water feature will cost them once they move in.
Bad DIY

They seemed like good ideas at the time - laying your own floor, installing your own cabinets and so on - and the results weren't all that bad. One or two mistakes here and there but you have learned to live with them.

The problem is while you may have lived with the flubs that occurred during your do it yourself project a potential buyer will probably not want to. And they will see it; home buyers develop eagle eye vision and demand a price reduction because they will have to be the ones paying to fix it.

The bottom line is that, yes, your home is your castle and if you want a heart shaped bath and bright blue walls in a restaurant style kitchen you should be able to have them. Just make sure that you understand the potential impact such things will have on your home's resale value before you get such projects underway.