Almost every homeowner runs into points where they feel like adding a little more value to their home. This may be in preparation for a sale or simply a long-term financial safety net. When most people hear “home improvement”, they think about extensions, loft conversions or bathroom remodelling. These can all be great for adding value to a home, but what about going past your walls? Here are some excellent ways to add value to your home in the garden.
We’ll start with the front yard. If you’ve got enough space here, you could add a truly striking feature to your home, along with quite a few figures to the property’s value. If you hadn’t already guessed, I’m talking about a tree-lined drive. Even if you take a casual glance at a home with a tree-lined drive, you get an immediate feeling of wealth and prestige. Perhaps you’ve got an especially long-term vision when it comes to these home improvements. If this is the case, you can buy a few fast-growing saplings and have them planted in two long flanks either side of your drive. You can read about some really nice species at Fine Gardening.
Lining the drive with trees can give the impression of prestige and luxury to almost any home, but what if you want the real thing? If you live in a larger, rural home, then potential buyers in the future will be looking out for properties with tennis courts and swimming pools. A lot of professional renovators call these kinds of features “the toys” for obvious reasons. In any house, swimming pools and sports courts scream luxury, and will add a considerable amount onto the potential listing price of your home. It will also be a lot of fun to use in the interval! If you’re considering one of these features purely as an investment, then tennis courts usually add more value than pools. However, when the pool is an indoor, heated extension, it’s generally a smarter investment.
Finally, outdoor rooms and granny flats. These are a relatively new feature, but you’re going to hear more and more about them in time. These are essentially small living spaces in a home’s garden, with a wide variety of styles and applications. Take a look at Backyard Grannys for some examples. One of the biggest attractions of these is the extra value it adds to the property. As soon as buyers see that a property has a granny flat, they get all kinds of ideas for how their household could use it. Furthermore, you could always rent the space out to tenants if some rental property you own stops bringing in money. The feature will also give you some more claimables on your depreciation schedule. The back-and-forth legalese with your local council may be a hassle, but an outside room could be just the garden improvement you’ve been looking for.
I hope these ideas for improving your garden have simplified your big home improvement project. Of course, these three features make up a tiny part of all the possibilities out there!
