Renovations are often done to enhance your home’s value — whether for yourself or resale.

What you should understand before doing any expensive work to your home is that some renovations could actually potentially hurt your home’s value when it comes time to sell.

What kind of renovation could actually hurt your home’s value? According to a Marketwatch post, the items below:

Removing a Bedroom. If your home has four bedrooms, and you are considering combining two of them into one large one — making your home into a three bedroom home, that could potentially significantly reduce your home’s value.

Often, more bedrooms garner homeowners more money when it comes to resale.

That isn’t to say that if you are calling a room a bedroom that really isn’t one, (for example, it is off the kitchen, doesn’t have private space/doors and you are just using it as a bedroom,) that it would count as a bedroom for a potential buyer. In that situation, calling it a “bedroom” if it isn’t a true bedroom may not capture more money in the real estate market.

Removing a Closet. People need places to put things. Not having enough closet space can be a big turnoff for potential buyers. If you want to put something where a closet is, make sure to find a new place to put that closet – in the same room!

Removing the Garage – or turning into living space. This one, depending on your location in Baltimore, may or may not be a good idea. There are some Lutherville homes where people have converted their garages into family rooms very well, and I truly believe it has helped their home’s value. It increased living space, and made it very inviting. The key is the area. In those situations, neighbors did not necessarily have garages, so it isn’t necessarily a requirement when people are looking for homes in the area. When one goes down the street, there are many cars parked in the driveway, indicating that people, even if they DO have garages, don’t use them to park their cars.

With a garage conversion, I would recommend really looking at your neighborhood to determine if it would be a good idea.

Putting Up Too Much Wallpaper. Notice that this is specific to wallpaper, and not bold, bright colored paint. Paint can be easily changed before selling a home. Wallpaper is a much harder task to remove. There aren’t many painting contractors who will agree to take wallpaper down — and if they do, it could be at a considerable expense. This can be a big turnoff to potential homebuyers.

Renovations for your needs can be a great decision. Just keep in mind that for the future, some renovations could affect your house value, and not necessarily in the way that you intended.

For more information on your Lutherville home value, please contact me. I would be pleased to help!