You Want to DO WHAT to the Kitchen


You Want to DO WHAT to the Kitchen?

We once bought a house in a luxury city suburb that was very traditional on the outside. It was stucco with rock around the front door and beautiful windows trimmed in white. Inside there was lots of fancy trim, also painted white with over-mantels, wide crown molding and baseboards and very traditional fireplaces.

But…

In that very traditional atmosphere someone had stuck a very hard contemporary kitchen with melamine cabinets with oak trim.

When we bought that house it had been for sale for years!

That kitchen literally made the house unmarketable.

Why?

Prospective buyers who looked at the house and liked it from the outside were very disappointed when they saw the kitchen…and did not buy.

It wasn’t that the cabinets weren’t nice. They were nicely made and obviously not cheap.

But they didn’t go with the house and the style buyers were expecting.

And you know what else?

Kitchens usually cost a LOT of $$$ to fix.

Well I didn’t want to fix it either but it was 10 minutes from my husbands work, so we bought it.

Then I had a cabinet maker make me paneled doors out of MDF, painted them cream…not white…and generally made the kitchen look like something you might find in an old Queen Anne style house.

I also had to repaint all the white trim.

What a pain!

But guess what else?

It warmed up the whole house and was easier on the eyes.

Additionally we finished all the sides and ends of the island and cabinets to give the kitchen a custom look (total cost for everything about $1,200).

When we finished we put the house on the market, advertising it in the local newspaper.

The 1ST couple that looked at it bought it, and we moved to our mountain cabin. If we had spent the $30,000 to $50,000 that many TV shows say to do, we would still have sold our home but we would have probably only recouped maybe half of that if we were lucky. That’s a $15,000 to $25,000 LOSS! Don’t make that mistake. If something as key to a sale as a kitchen needs to be updated, do it smart. Don’t throw money into that deep dark home remodel hole. We hope to find this treasure trove some day and retire as zillionaires on all the wasted home remodeling money spent and even financed over 30 years.

Paula and her husband Ron have a note buying business. They buy mortgage notes and help home sellers offer owner financing to sell their home fast. Learn more at Selling A Note

You Want to DO WHAT to the Kitchen? / Author: Ron Stone