Remodeling Trends

Tweaks, Not 'Blowouts'

Nice piece in the WSJ last week about remodeling trends.

Here's a snippet:

Smaller projects like updating kitchens and baths and humble attic-bedroom conversions are more popular, while two-story master suites and $100,000 kitchen blowouts are decidedly out of fashion. One of the most cost-effective improvements, say contractors, is removing a wall to create an open kitchen-dining area.

--"The New Rules of Remodeling"; The Wall Street Journal (4/24/2010)

The only thing I'd add is that changing a home's footprint (foundation, roof line, and exterior walls) raises the difficulty factor -- and cost -- exponentially.

I've long espoused a real estate equivalent to medicine's Hippocratic Oath: 'first, do no harm.'