When people are thinking of selling their homes, I always get this question asked: What are inexpensive ways I can increase the value of my home? In this brief post, I'll outline 5 inexpensive ways you can help the value of your home. Sometimes the value will be in immediate increase in price, or others may increase the attractiveness, leading to a quicker sale, which almost always generates a higher sales price.

Paint

Painting the interior your home is relatively inexpensive if you are handy. High quality paint runs about $30 per gallon while inexpensive paint can be about $15. Most typical houses would take a few gallons to paint, so you can figure $150-200 of paint. By painting the interior rooms of your home, it gives the buyer a fresh feel. Paint is one of the least expensive improvements that go a long ways in improving value.

Light Fixtures

If you have brass light fixtures from the 80's or 90's you might consider upgrading them to something more contemporary. Light fixtures can be a "wow" factor in a room and can really make a room "shine," no pun intended. When you do replace a light fixture, put in the highest amount of watts of light that the fixture can handle. Most fixtures will have a sticker telling you how many watts you can put in. An example might be "Type A, 75 watts." These ratings are for incandescent bulbs. If you put in CFL or LED bulb you can shed even more light in the rooms. A CFL that is rated at 23 watts puts out as much as the old incandescent 100 watt bulbs. Lighting outlet stores have some very nice fixtures that start under $100. We put in a cool fixture in my parents dining room for $160.

Staging

Bringing in a stager doesn't mean thousands of dollars. I have stagers that I work with that can do a staging consultation for just a few hundred bucks. They will walk through the house, and give you recommendations as to what to do, what colors to change, and how to place the furniture. These things can really help a buyer envision living in the house.

Kitchen Upgrades

Not everything in a kitchen is expensive. One thing you can do besides paint, is to tile the backsplash. This can easily add polish to a drab kitchen. A few other easy items in a kitchen are: change the kitchen faucet to a new one (example moen faucet), put a spice organizer on the backsplash (example Ikea Grundtal), add soft closing mechanisms to the cabinets (example Ikea door dampener) and the like. Many of these kitchen projects can be done between $25 - $100.

Fix Minor Items

There are always a bunch of minor little things that one could fix around the house. Do them. These little things can make a buyer feel that the quality just isn't there, or if there are a bunch of little things, they may ask for all of them on the inspection, or they may ask for a reduction due to the inspection. These minor little things add up quickly. Here is a list of some of the common little things:

Loose outlets, missing switch covers / outlet covers, drippy faucet, toilet that runs occasionally, loose register covers, faucets that have scale on them, smoke / CO detectors with low batteries, loose blinds, loose drapery rods, missing / cracked caulking, missing window latch, broken door knobs, door knobs that you have to fiddle with to get to work, sliding doors that fall off the track or are hard to open (grease the bearing), door hinges that squeak, ceiling fans that wobble, burnt out light bulbs, noisy furnace exhaust flue motor, loose handrails, loose deck boards, rotted deck boards, and anything else you can think of.