The best house projects for the biggest ROI

Learn which are the best house projects for the biggest ROI when renovating your home, and discover a tools that could be invaluable when renovating.  This post is sponsored by Travelers Insurance. As always, opinions are 100% my own. 

If you’ve been reading my site for any amount of time, you’ll know that in the past five years, we have lived in and fixed up two homes. We sold our first house by owner in a short amount of time, and we were able to come out with a profit after living in the house for less than two years. We’re currently fixing up our “forever home,” and are always working on our never-ending list of home renovations!

Whether you’re fixing up a house that you know you’re just going to live in for a short amount of time, working on a bigger renovation for a home that may not be your “forever home,” or flipping a house to sell, it’s vital to focus on projects that will give you the best return on investment (ROI).

We witnessed firsthand how remodeling these rooms on a budget really helped give us the best possible ROI. When you’re working on a home, focus on these spaces first, and put your financial resources into these rooms so you can get the best ROI when selling:

The best house projects for the biggest ROI:

Kitchen renovation:

The biggest return on investment in any house is a full kitchen renovation. It’s a hard and usually an expensive investment, but it will pay off in the long run. Our kitchen renovation was the biggest project we’d tackled at the time, and it was such a big undertaking! But look at how much better it is now:

See our full kitchen renovation here

 

Kitchen makeover:

This will make a big impact on your ROI, but won’t be as intensive or expensive as a full kitchen renovation.  We did this with our last house – we painted the existing lower cabinets, changed the flooring, backsplash, countertops and appliances, but didn’t do a full kitchen renovation.  This absolutely helped to sell our house as quickly as it did:

Come see our first big makeover here – we did it under $3500!

 

Bathroom makeover:

This makeover was such a huge undertaking for us, but it’s easy to see that it would have a huge ROI for us if we’d want to sell the house.  A bathroom makeover or renovation can be hard to live through, but it’ll be worth it in the end!

See the full bathroom makeover here

 

More Ideas for Home Improvement ROI

There’s so much more to learn about home renovations on the Travelers website, including two more places to focus on when remodeling a home. I never would have imagined the last one on the list was such a great return on investment! 

While you’re buying/selling a home, it’s easy to feel a little worried about the unknowns.  We felt this way when we bought both of our houses, because both of them were old homes (built in 1920 and 1902) and they weren’t being sold by the owners (both had passed).  

 

I wish I had known about this *free* OpenHouse tool that Travelers provides when we were buying these houses. When using the Travelers Insurance OpenHouse tool, all you do is plug in your address, and you’ll be able to see a list of home repairs that were done on the house with a permit.

 

This tool is part of Traveler’s Home Central – a free resource for anyone who is a homeowner or who is looking to become one.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll find a lot of valuable information on their website here. 

On the homepage is an article about how to stage your home to sell quickly – there are really helpful tips in there that we used when selling our house as well!  But Home Central goes far beyond buying/selling a home, and is also really helpful for anyone who is looking to start any renovations in their home (or looking for tips on general maintenance & upkeep).

Check out Traveler’s free Home Central tool here. 

 

Thanks again to Travelers for sponsoring this post about the best house projects for the biggest ROI.  Again, all opinions are always 100% my own.

If you liked this post, you’ll love this article about how to save money while doing home renovations: