Al Heavens is a Haddonfield, N.J.- based, nationally syndicated, home-improvement writer and author whose newspaper columns, magazine articles and books have been the first word on remodeling for 50 million readers for more than three decades.
He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home and Remodeling on The Money: Fifteen Innovative Projects Designed to Add Value to Your Home, and was “The Gadgeteer” on Discovery Channel’s Home Matters program.
Early in my career as a newspaper reporter (B.C. or Before College), I was asked to write year-end reviews, that is, stories highlighting the events of the past year.
Everyone had to write them, and, frankly, they were routine to the point of being bland and boring. I doubt many people read them, since, unless they had been comatose for the previous 365 days, they were quite familiar with what had occurred.
At my first newspaper after college, however, the editor had a much better idea. The past year was old news, he said, so write instead about the future and what, based on interviews with movers, shakers, and regular folks, might be in store.
It was called, appropriately, “The Progress Edition.” For the next 45 years, and at other newspapers, I remained true to the idea that you cannot change the past, but you certainly can use it to influence the future.
What follows, therefore, is my “Progress Edition,” as it pertains to home remodeling in 2021.
Of course, although 99.1 percent of us are longing to forget 2020, the fact is that the COVID-19 pandemic has established many of the remodeling trends that will likely continue well into the next year and even longer.
This is not such a bad thing, however. People spent more time at home than perhaps ever before, and the result was a greater interest in making improvements to their living space.
This experience is not unprecedented. In the five years following Sept. 11, 2001, real residential investment — both renovations and home purchases — increased as much as 40 percent, surpassing levels seen during the real estate boom of the late 1980s, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank.
Concerned that the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were just the beginning, many people began spending more time at home surrounded by family. Houses, both through construction and renovation, became larger, with family rooms, home theaters and offices, and outdoor areas such as decks, patios, and pools.
Because home values had increased so much, homeowners were able to tap into huge amounts of equity to pay for these improvements. Unfortunately, too many borrowed too much, and the payback was the financial crisis of 2008 and a pandemic of foreclosures that lasted for seven years.
I had thought that the lessons of the foreclosure years had been ingrained deeply enough to prevent a repeat, but what I saw first-hand as a newly minted real estate agent in the nine months before the lockdown began in March 2020 was that they had not.
Many home buyers were paying much too much for so-called “perfect” houses because, as one told me, “I’d much rather pay top dollar, so I don’t have to do anything when I move in.”
A nice thought but totally unrealistic. There are no perfect houses. Every house requires work. Familiarity breeds contempt, or at least a desire for something better or new. These buyers were, as we older and smarter homeowners have long known, deluding themselves.
I have been wondering how “perfection buying” has fared during the pandemic.
Homes sales are booming, because Americans who have savings, stable jobs, and good credit scores are taking advantage of the cheapest mortgage rates on record to bargain shop for larger homes. New mortgage applications just hit a level not seen since 2008, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.
What and where they are buying is more interesting. The Washington Post had a telling piece in July about a 1950s-style, three-bedroom house in a small town outside of Harrisburg. The asking price was $200,000. There were 26 offers the first weekend, with some coming from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
One person offered $50,000 above the asking price. Others declined home inspections.
This is just one example, of course, but it is fairly obvious that a 1950s house would be far from perfect.
“People are literally trying to get back to a house in the suburbs with a yard and a fence,” said the real estate agent who was listing the house.
The danger in all of this is, of course, that the lowest mortgage interest rates in history coupled with limited inventory could result in too many buyers getting in over their heads, setting the stage for a repeat of 2008.
So far, the experts have not seen overspending on renovation projects, however.
According to Stoneside Blinds & Shades of Denver, homeowners on average have spent $1,031 on renovations since March.
Generation X reported the most ($1,178.41), followed by baby boomers ($1,099.46), and millennials ($998.68). The bedroom was the top room to receive renovating, at 31 percent, followed by the kitchen at 29.8 percent, and the bathroom at 27.3 percent.
Most consumers hired a professional for these projects, with 25 percent or fewer reporting tackling them as a do-it-yourself project. Respondents who did the projects themselves estimated that they saved more than $600 in doing so, however.
This is not a lot of money, of course, and I am sure that the do-it-yourself projects were not major kitchen renovations. Yet, there seems to be an effort to make houses more “homey,” for want of a better description, and not “perfect.”
If anything, the pandemic seems to have made homeowner expectations more realistic.
Based on what I have been seeing over the last 10 months, here are the remodeling projects I believe homeowners will be asking for in 2021 and beyond:
Laundry rooms. A separate laundry room where clothes can be ironed and folded, reducing such clutter elsewhere in the house. This will require more than a closet.
Energy-saving appliances. There is nothing really new here, but it follows the “green” trend that started building a head of steam in the late 1990s. The only problem is that they get more efficient every day, so what was the best you could buy this year will be old hat two years down the road.
Places to entertain. We call ours the courtyard off the kitchen, but “patio” is more common. When it gets safe to have friends over again, a hardscaped patio with grill, chairs and a table will be the place to hold court. I put a tent over ours, ran an outdoor extension from a GFCI outlet near the kitchen stairs to the table, and the patio became our home office during nice weather.
Windows. A no-brainer but a lot of locked-down homeowners who used to leave the house early and come home late have been surprised by how dark and drafty the place could be even in the middle of the day filled with sunshine. There is nothing nicer than sitting in the garden room of my kitchen at 1 p.m., dozing as the afternoon sun warms me in my easy chair.
Eat-in kitchens. We had these when I was growing up (only rich people had dining rooms), and there is something about the intimacy that an eat-in kitchen seems to offer. It is a good place for kids zooming to school to be based, because they can, in theory, eat lunch at their desks.
Dining rooms. Open floor plans sacrificed the dining room as a separate place, but, like the eat-in kitchen, creating a space where a family can come together has become very important in this most-stressful time.
Closets and storage space. The fact that people spent so many months confined to their homes seems to have increased the need to keep clutter in check.
I guess just finding a place for everything and everything in its place can be considered progress.