Selling Your House: Focus on the Kitchen

It’s a situation faced by many homeowners on the cusp of getting ready to sell. You’ve developed cooking skills customized for your run-of-the-mill kitchen for years, managing everything from the electric range (you prefer gas) to the slightly-too-small refrigerator. That takes thoughtful grocery ferrying between it and the old frig (it deserves retirement) that lives in the garage. There’s nothing to it, really!

But now, it’s selling time for your house. Is the best course to assume the buyer will not worry about the kitchen because she/he will want to do a full-scale remodel to her/his own specifications? Or should you start writing a 50-page manual on how to actually prepare food in this kitchen’s current state (perhaps you could title it, “Cooking Here:  You Can Learn to Love It”)?

Okay; neither approach is going to do anything but bring down the value of your house—including what you can expect to set as an appealing asking price. But spending a fortune on a whole major kitchen remodel would be an expensive and time-consuming solution. A solution is made more critical because the kitchen is often placed in the top 3 most decisive factors motivating buyers. 

The decision about what to do is dependent on many other factors, but some current guidelines should help point you in a sensible direction:

• Among the most-recommended update features, Cabinet Refacing, Countertop Updating, New Appliances, and Updated Kitchen Light Fixtures often prevail.
• Among renovations that can actually decrease value are Lavish Lighting Fixtures, Too Much Wallpaper, Texture on Walls, Quirky Tiling, and Too Much Carpeting
• Listed atop ‘cheap ways to make a kitchen expensive’ are Update Hardware, Use Lighter Colors, Replace Cabinet Doors, and Use Artwork.

A caution about that last: “Use Artwork”—staging professionals are clear that pleasant, mainstream artistic choices are mandatory. Anything else risks overly personalizing a home’s ambiance—a definite no-no. 

On the positive side, if your kitchen is already clean and neutral, more than minor updates will probably not be necessary. Keeping in mind that the average lifespan of a home appliance is around 10-15 years, if a refrigerator has become annoyingly noisy or the dishwasher has noticeable signs of rust, replacement is called for. When you hire our agents to help with your sale, part of the advantage is an experienced second opinion on what is proving to be most important to today’s buyers. Call one of our agents!