Playgrounds
If you have a child and a private yard, you may be considering constructing a playground. This type of improvement can only be looked at as a personal enjoyment improvement.
The materials for a playground can cost well over thousand dollars. You can buy kits to construct elaborate playgrounds, and you can buy normal building materials to build the play area. There are also sets, both wood and metal, available from various retail stores. Some playgrounds need doors, which you can get from a door or replacement window company.
If you build much of a playground, you will invest at least $500. This is not a lot of money by today’s standards, and if your children enjoy the improvement for a few years, it is probably money well spent. However, from an appraisal point of view, the improvement is normally worthless. If anything, it may lower your home’s value. The playground will undoubtedly take up space in the yard and the grounds and then around the play area will most likely be worn down the bearers. The cost of returning that area to a natural lawn could be significant, and an appraiser may lower the overall value of your home to reflect to this cost.
Well, we have completed our list of outside recreational improvements, and we are about to move onto exterior home improvements. The improvements in the next section are more traditional and will apply to many more people than the recreational improvements in this chapter might.
Exterior home improvements
Exterior home improvements are often either ignored or done in haste, without much research. It is easy to be talked into having vinyl siding installed on your home, but is the maintenance free siding (as it is so often called) really a good investment? For that matter, is vinyl siding truly maintenance three? With a new coat of paint be a more viable alternative to exterior walls requiring attention? This question and many others like it are addressed in this section. While Charley Harper artwork is great for the interior of the home, let’s talk about some of the exterior improvements you can make.
The improvements you make to the exterior of your home are subject to weather and to public opinion. If you allow your teenager to paint a bedroom purple, not many people are going to see the bold decorating statement. However, if you were to paint the siding of your home purple, the color would be out there for all the world to see and judge. Exterior improvements should not be made in haste, and they should not be taken lightly.
Home-improvement salespeople
Home-improvement salespeople often find themselves in the news, and generally, it is not for winning sales awards. Newspapers all across the country carry stories of how slick salespeople have either sold their services at highly inflated prices or defrauded customers. This type of news scares the public and brings legitimate home-improvement contractors under intense scrutiny.
Many people are susceptible to unscrupulous salespeople. It is easy for a sales professional to convince an average homeowner that its titular home improvement is needed. It is also easy for the salespeople to sell a percentage of their jobs right on the spot. Homeowners become concerned about their homes and act to have problems corrected or improvements made without doing the research that they should. It is not really the homeowners fault; he frequently doesn’t know the right questions to ask, and he has no idea what it should cost to have a particular improvement done. This trusting homeowner gets a hardball sales pitch, and offer of easy, on the spot financing, and before he knows it, it has signed a contract for the repairs or prudence.
This type of activity goes on all the time, and many people never realized they had a too much for the services or products received. Even if the home-improvement company does a good job and is guilty only of charging above average prices, consumer can be hurt financially.
While we are not going to show you how to choose a reputable contractor, it is going to help you to protect yourself from outrageous prices. Use this information as one of the pieces of your home-improvement puzzle, and you can work to ensure a good job at a fair price. Let’s look at some of the types of exterior home improvements you might be considering and assess their costs and values.