Homeowners are eyeing their kitchens and bathrooms when it comes to home sprucing. The median spending cost on kitchen remodels rose 10 percent year over year in 2017, according to home remodeling website Houzz’s latest study, “2018 Houzz & Home: Overview of U.S. Renovation.” Other bathrooms and master bathrooms were the second and third most popular rooms, respectively, that homeowners claimed they wanted to renovate.
Four in five renovating homeowners say that the kitchen and the master bathroom are upgrades that can increase the value of their homes, far more than any other renovation project.
They’re looking at exterior spaces, too. Installation of roofing, decks, and siding and stucco saw the largest year-over-year increases in renovation projects, according to the report. Overall, the top exterior building upgrades are: exterior paint (23%); windows or skylights (22%); exterior doors (21%); roofing (21%); gutters and downspouts (19%); and a deck (15%).
When it comes to the spending involved in home remodeling, kitchens are the most costly—renovating homeowners planned to spend $11,000 to remodel their kitchens. In total, a typical renovating homeowner surveyed by Houzz was planning to spend a median of $15,000 on their remodels, which is in line with expenditures in 2016 and 2015.
Homeowners have become more deliberate in planning and budgeting before taking on a renovation project, the survey showed. For example, homeowners were 12 percent more likely to set a budget in 2017 (77%) than in 2015 (69%). Also, homeowners were more likely over the past year to tackle multiple preventative projects at a time, such as home systems, exterior feature upgrades, and hiring specialists to complete these projects.
Many homeowners leverage cash or their savings to fund renovations. For example, 32 percent of respondents said they planned to put their remodels on credit cards while 11 percent said they had loans secured in the home value, such as a home equity line of credit, to pay for the remodel.
