Recoup your Home Improvements

Are you thinking about adding an outdoor room now that summer is almost here, but wondering if your investment will pay off? Whether you're planning to sell right away, or refinance, or entertain outdoors more often, a remodeling project that fits your budget can be a great investment. You not only add tremendous enjoyment, livability and use value to your home — it's likely that significant dollars will be added to its price tag when you put the for sale sign up! Major remodeling projects are said to increase home value up to 80-90 cents for every dollar you invest.

While a new paint job, updated interiors, and maintained landscaping certainly helps a sales price, improvements that increase the square footage of your house give it the most upward leverage. An additional bedroom or bathroom opens the door for an appraiser to make higher adjustments when determining your home's value against other comparable ones.

It's often advisable to hire a residential appraiser to measure a home's square footage — the service could pay for itself if it was measured incorrectly before. Sometimes a home's square footage will be higher than what your county assessor has recorded. So while the market is a factor in setting sale prices, homes still sell for dollars per square foot, and you want to make sure you have every one of them counted. You can even verify your home's square footage with a tape measure and some graph paper!