12 Ways to Add Value to Your Home

12 Ways to Add Value to Your Home

Owning a property requires a massive financial commitment, but beyond that, it also creates a home. Sensible investors work hard to make their commitments pay off, and by improving your property, you’ll also improve your quality of life. With the housing market still in flux following the pandemic, property owners can shore up their investments with simple home improvements. Whether you’re looking for aesthetic tweaks to catch a surveyor’s eye or structural changes that’ll add £10,000s to your property, researching ways to add value to your home delivers all the tools you’ll need for the perfect household makeover.

Assessing the Different Ways to Add Value to Your Home

Like all important financial commitments, it’s important to approach your property upgrades with thorough research and consideration. Before you start learning how to add value to your home, consider its current value. Learning more about your property’s value, along with the rest of the properties in the local area and the general state of the property market, informs your next steps. Researching property value from articles such as this, alongside discussion with professional estate agents, property surveyors, designers, structural engineers, and fellow homeowners, can all help you build a strong foundation for your next renovation project.

Boosting Kerb Appeal With An Exterior Upgrade

Upgrading your home’s street-facing exterior offers a simple, effective route to boosting property value. Put yourself in the shoes of a guest, property valuation expert, or potential buyer: first impressions matter, and you don’t want them to make up their mind before they even walk through the front door.

Ways to add value to your home’s exterior include repainting, rendering, and upgrading the brickwork. Repointing bricks, repairing cracks, and cleaning moss or pollution can all help freshen up the front of your property. Many homeowners capitalise on their exterior improvements by upgrading their front doors, and modern solutions like composite doors boost security while creating a valuable welcoming place for your home.

Improving Your Garden

The more time we spend in and around our homes, the more value gardens at to your properties. With employees increasingly switching to hybrid and remote working arrangements, homeowners spend more time looking into their gardens and finding more time to improve them.

Crucially, garden upgrades don’t disrupt your living areas in the way that a bedroom or kitchen development might. Adding a patio, a garden shed, a flower bed, or some chairs and a parasol can really make your garden come to life. Even something as simple as weeding and pruning provides some fresh air and some extra value.

Environmentally Friendly Ways to Add Value to Your Home

Green investments are all the rage as awareness rises and environmental consciousness grows. Most ecological upgrades to your property add value to your home while shrinking your environmental impact and cutting costs to your bills in the long run. For example, one-time payments for wall or loft insulation can permanently slash your heating bill. Adding a solar panel to your south-facing roof helps subsidise your energy costs while increasing your home’s overall value.

Overhauling Your Heating Systems

Everyone who’s suffered a cold winter in the UK knows the importance of effective heating. Upgrading your heating creates a valuable selling point for your property while impressing your guests and improving your quality of life. Of course, you can heat your home in many ways, from fireplaces to space heaters. Having a plumber check your radiators for pressure issues and blockages ensures your heating stays fully functional. You can even consider adding new radiators, replacing your boiler, or installing under-floor heating in your bathroom to boost your property value.

Brightening Up Your Lighting

Of all the ways to add value to your home, lighting offers a single project with the power to improve each and every room. No one wants a dingy property, and modernising your lighting fixtures helps you banish gloom from every nook and cranny. Natural light also brings a lot to a home, and welcoming the sunshine boosts mood alongside property value. Design-savvy homeowners often create a flow of light between windows, doors, and stairwells. Replacing internal dividers or garden access with glazed bifold doors helps accentuate your garden and create a welcoming, sun-soaked home.

Structural Changes to Shore Up Your Property

As you’ll recall from when you bought your property, new buyers always carry out structural surveys as a top priority.

Reinforcing your home’s roof, walls, and ceilings, therefore, adds a resilient core to your property’s value. Leaky roofs, leaning walls, and cracked ceilings can all knock thousands from your asset. Tackling these basics while you improve your property’s aesthetic features creates a valuable, durable, and safe home.

Upgrading Your Floorplan

Plenty of homes feature pointless rooms and spaces that don’t contribute to your home or the lived experience within. Rejigging your walls, and the rooms between them, can turn wasted space into fresh opportunities. Some homeowners add internal windows, remove columns, or get rid of a wall altogether, to create open-plan living spaces. Others turn unused hallways or nooks into office spaces, pantries, en suites, or even new bedrooms.

Freshening Up Your Bathroom

A clean, functional, and visually appealing bathroom can make or break your property value. However, they often fall into disrepair with frequent use and infrequent maintenance. This makes freshening up your bathroom one of the more important ways to add value to your home.

Bathrooms often suffer from dampness and mould, so cleaning or regrouting, along with improving airflow with windows and extractor fans, works wonders. Small tweaks like new taps, mirrors, toilet seats, and shower heads also make a big difference. For larger renovation projects, homeowners should also consider retiling cracked, faded, or dated bathrooms.

Options For Upgrading Your Kitchen

Kitchens create a household’s hub, and surveyors often look for up-to-date kitchens when they’re assessing property value. In modern homes, kitchens should be welcoming and well-lit while delivering enough space and equipment for food preparation.

Homeowners typically focus on maintaining basic equipment like ovens, but upgrading your refrigeration and your dishwashing capabilities can add a sense of luxury to the room. New countertops, backsplashes, and storage solutions also make a big impression on your guests.

Cost-Effective Ways to Add Value to Your Home Decor

If you don’t have the scope to knock down a wall or build a new extension, refreshing your décor delivers plenty more ways to add value to your home. Like many of the tips so far, this strategy scales from minor tweaks to major projects. Many interior designers favour minimalist, Scandinavian décor. Decluttering your home and reorganising your storage can bring your property up to date.

Larger-scale projects include structural changes to your home’s interior. Previous renovations may actually detract from your property value. Exposing beams, brickwork, and fireplaces helps rebuild character in your home. Similarly, returning to wooden flooring or painting your property in neutral or warm tones creates a sophisticated yet homely feel.

Conclusions: Choosing the Best Ways to Add Value to Your Home

Living in your home gives you a great insight into its best and worst features. Accentuating these highlights and fixing any drawbacks helps you add value, from your loft to your basement, from the bottom of the garden to your own front door.