[quote=bearishgurl]CAR, I know you won’t be selling any year soon, but I think you might be surprised if you were to obtain a current appraisal. Quality remodeling is actually WORTH something in areas which are more than 15 years old (not sure if yours is). It seems the vast majority of today’s buyers want “turnkey” property and are willing to pay for that. Hence the continued (irrationally exuberant) interest in *new construction tracts* by the younger cohort of Gen X, as well as Gen Y. This appears to be true, no matter WHERE these new tracts are located (i.e. adjacent to fmr landfill, out in lizardland, in boxed-in warm inland area, etc).
Truly, you have the best of all worlds … location, lot size and extensive updating! It doesn’t get any better than that![/quote]
Yes, we really do have the best of all worlds because we have the best house, lot, and location we could ever have wanted. Yes, it’s an older house, which is exactly what we wanted, too.
That being said, if we were to sell our house today, we’d lose a very significant amount of money because of the addition/upgrades on the house. We knew this going in, and made a conscious decision to go ahead because we did the work so the house could better accomodate our family and our needs. We never planned on recouping any of our money, so it just wasn’t an issue for us. We turned a house that would just barely accomodate us into something we absolutely love living in, every single day.
Unless the market is going up, there are **very few** upgrades that will return anywhere near 100% of one’s money. For us, we’d **maybe** get 10% back on our money.
It doesn’t matter though. If everything goes as planned, it will be our kids’ problem, not ours. 🙂
