By Len McAdams

I am looking forward to sharing with you the latest news and trends related to maintaining and upgrading your home over the coming months. Being in the home remodeling business continues to be an interesting and challenging career for me and my team. Please join us for each new issue.

Owning a home has been, for most of my adult life, an achievable American dream. I struggled to buy my first home over 40 years ago and have been owning, fixing, and enjoying my slice of the dream ever since, and for most of that time cooking one up for a client or two.

In this issue we’ll talk about three major areas of concern for any of us who own a home or are considering a purchase: routine maintenance, major repairs, and improvements to adapt your home to changing life stages.

For most of us, our home is our greatest asset and if we have lived there for very long, it’s a bit like our favorite pair of shoes. It fits our life, gives comfort and protection, and with a certain amount of polish and repair will last a long time. Just like shoes, even the best built houses will not last forever, but there are homes in Europe that have been continuously occupied for hundreds of years.

The path to a long useful life for buildings is a pattern of gradual upgrades and replacements. To cite one example, consider a gas fired furnace quite common in our area. Many of these units installed over 20 years ago are still in use, sending 20 to 30 percent of the energy we buy up the chimney. Combine these losses with poorly insulated leaky ductwork and half of your gas bill is wasted! Worse yet these obsolete heating units often have cracked or corroded heat exchangers that threaten us with carbon monoxide poisoning. As technology improves and energy costs rise, it probably makes economic sense to upgrade your heating system every five years. Meanwhile, most of us don’t even look at the furnace as long as warm air comes out of the registers and the thermostat works.

According to many experts, we should budget 3 percent of our home values for maintenance and routine replacements. That seems like a lot at first, but if we consider the useful life of the roof, the furnace, the deck, the kitchen and so on it may not be so farfetched. Yet few owners spend nearly that much, and many younger, cash-strapped households go years with almost no repairs or upgrades. For the past decade such neglect has been “bailed out” by housing inflation, but it is no longer possible to pass on neglect to the next owner or pull “fix up” money out of miraculously growing equity. Just ask a neighbor who is trying to sell a home in this difficult market. Prospective buyers are very wary of taking on a house full of deferred maintenance or worn out systems.

So far we have only talked about “staying even,” but growing (or shrinking) household size and other lifestyle changes can be strong motivations to expand or modify our home. For younger families with children there doesn’t ever seem to be enough space, and then they grow. And the number of us whose parents are moving in continues to grow steadily. Home offices, entertaining, hobbies and the like all compete for space and features.

These situations often bring up a major family decision — whether to move to a different house or stay and remodel. In future articles we will look at these options in detail, considering the economics as well as the various design and construction services it takes to expand or renovate part or all of your current home. What we can say today is that remodeling is sometimes the best way to keep what you value most, whether that is the school district, neighborhood, view, or something more personal. For example, several clients have remodeled their parents’ old homestead so the next generation could continue to live there.

As “irrational exuberance” is replaced by honesty about housing values, I believe our motivation to move will be tempered by a desire to better care for and enjoy the family homes where we already live. And we can expect well-crafted investments in home maintenance and upgrades to pay off in better prices and shorter time on the market when it is time to sell.

Our current exposure to the foreclosure crisis and its impact will pass, and the lessons learned will ultimately strengthen our economy and the wealth of our nation, a nation of home owners.

Len McAdams is President of McAdams Builders, Kirkland based Design/Build Remodeling company, for over 30 years. He can be reached at 425-822-6555 or www.mcadamsbuilders.com