The housing market’s annual sales increased by 5 percent in 2020, despite the health crisis and other events. Experts predict and even bigger jump in 2021, with the annual sales growth expected to increase to over 10 percent in the coming year.
If you want to sell your house this year, you may have to do some home renovations. But most homeowners will focus on refurbishing their kitchens, retiling their bathrooms or repainting their roofs. Although these are all important aspects of home improvement, you should also renovate your attic and basement.
Checking these areas could be in a buyer’s house hunting checklist. Reliable home appraisers will definitely assess these spaces when evaluating your property. Leaving your basement and attic in a sorry condition can be deal breaker for potential buyers and devalue your home.
Here are eight tips to improve your home’s basement and attics for future sale.
Renovating Your Basement
The basement forms the foundation of your home, so it should be renovated with extra care and meticulous planning. After securing proper permits when you’re rebuilding, keep these best practices in mind.
- Keep it Dry
Extreme weather events have been increasing in the past year, including incidents of torrential rain and strong hurricanes. These events will their toll on your basement’s walls and foundations if you can’t keep them dry. Check your basement for any signs that groundwater is penetrating it such as pools of stagnant water or trickles. Patch cracks up and apply vapor barriers on external surfaces immediately to prevent moisture from further running your basement.
- Check the Machinery
You can find any number of machinery, such your home furnace, the water-heating system and maybe even the ventilation air-conditioning unit inside the basement. Make sure to include assessing them as part of your basement renovation. Are any of them more than a decade old? Are they still functioning properly? Replacing them can be expensive, but it may seal the deal for new buyers.
- Add a Subfloor
It’s a bad idea to leave your basement as bare dirt. Not only will this make it easier for water to seep in, it also invites pests and animals to burrow into your home. A bare concrete floor is also not good enough. Concrete can shift and crack and still allow moisture through inside your basement. A subfloor made of synthetic material can insulate your home and improve the appearance of your basement.
- Light it Up
Finally, put up plenty of lighting in your basement. The image of a dank, basement lit only a single bare bulb is very uninviting for plenty of reasons. Install the lighting of your choice, but make sure that you use energy-efficient products. This will make your basement not only inviting but also environmentally friendly.
Improving Your Attic
Most people only use their attics for an out of the way storage area. But you can’t just leave it unattended, especially if you want to put your home on the market.
Here are some tips for when you’re improving your attic.
- Clean it Out
People sometimes have a terrible habit of storing all sorts of bric-a-brac in their attics but leaving them up there for the next homeowner to find is poor form. For one thing, there may be valuables such as antiques and rare items lurking in your attic. Before you attempt any serious renovation, make sure to clean out every piece of junk stored in your attic.
- Secure All Wiring
Over 24,000 electrical fires in residential buildings were reported in the United States every year. These fires can start from frayed wiring. The electrical cables and wires in attics could be particularly prone to damage because you don’t see them regularly. When you’re renovating your attic, check all wiring and make sure their protective coatings are still intact. Secure them to support posts and walls with hooks to avoid them snagging whenever someone climbs up in the attic.
- Install Storage
You can increase the capacity of your attic by installing more storage solutions. In a pinch, you can haul up dressers and drawers for extra storage organization. However, it’s more efficient if you will construct built-in storage units right into the structure of your attic. Transform gables or slanted areas into cabinets. Install drawers on gabled windows or put up doors to turn them into closets.
- Soundproof It
If you’re planning on turning your attic into more than just a storage area, the first step would be to soundproof it. Put up some insulation around all exterior walls. This won’t just keep out the cold and retain heat, it will also decrease the noise that could filter out of the attic. Your floors should be covered by very thick area rugs and carpeting to muffle any sound that could leak to rooms below the attic.
Refurbishing and renovating your home for sale is a difficult endeavor. Including your attic and basement into your home improvement plans is an essential part of ensuring your house will be able to attract plenty of buyers and prevent your home from sitting unclaimed for months.
