10 Min Read
Is now the right moment for a Des Moines home remodel? Welcome to Compelling Homes’ latest video blog, where our visionary Rusty Green shares his insights on remodeling in captivating bite-sized nuggets. As a design-build remodeling company, Compelling Homes is dedicated to transforming houses into dream homes.
In these bite-sized interviews, Rusty answers common questions about the right time to remodel, whether to renovate one room or the whole home, the return on investment for different projects, balancing personal style and resale value, and finding creative solutions for outgrowing your current space. Discover Rusty's expert advice and learn why Compelling Homes is the perfect partner for your remodeling journey.
Below each video, you'll find a transcript for folks who prefer to read!
Ready to dive in? Let's go.
When is the right time to remodel?
Hi, I’m Rusty Green with Compelling Homes. We’re a design-build contractor here in the Des Moines area. One of the questions we get asked is, “When is the right time to remodel?” What I like to say is there are three right times and one not right time.
The first right time: You’ve been in a home for a number of years. You’ve raised children, you’ve lived in it for X amount of years, and it’s just worn out. You’ve over it. You’ve made design decisions and consumer decisions in a phase in your life you’ve since outgrown. That usually, kind of magically, coincides with a time when features, products, and finishes in your home are at end of life. Surfaces are worn out. Cabinetry is worn out. Fixtures are worn out. That’s #1. That’s a great time to remodel.
Number two: If you’ve had a significant life event. The last of the children are gone! They moved out. Or maybe your parents are moving back in. You’ve reached a point in your career and your life where you’re like, “Alright. This is it. If I’m ever going to do it, now’s the time. Let’s remodel it and renovate it and actually tailor the home so that we absolutely love it.” That’s the second time.
The third time is a little tricky. It’s where you decided to buy a home. You’ve bought it because of the address, the backyard, the commute to work, the school system, but you know nothing inside of the home is anywhere remotely close to your style. The finishes are worn out. The products are at end of life. That’s the third time. That’s a major renovation. It’s a great time to do it. You’re not even going to move in. You say, "Alright, dismantle it. Make it bespoke for the homeowner that lives inside of it and move on.” This is remarkably close to the time NOT to remodel.
NOT to remodel would be: if you’re going to buy the new home and you just don’t like it. You think you may want to do a kitchen, but you’re not sure. You may want to update the primary bath, but we don’t know yet. It’s drab. It’s ugly. It’s not our style. Whatever it may be. Don’t remodel–yet. Yet. The thing to do would be move in. We’re all creatures of habits. We’re all going to have an opportunity to live the way we want to live. And that home is going to change your pattern a little bit, but not your habits. You’re eventually going to find out how the home actually works for you and your habits and actually how it doesn’t. So, we recommend living in that home one, two, maybe three years before you say, “I’ve had it. We absolutely need to have the fill-in-the-blank.” Live in the home for a little while. So that immediate, “alright, I’m buying a house, and I want to update the kitchen?” Eh, move in. Get used to it. Get to know it. You’ll be amazed at what decisions you’ll make after having lived in the house for a little while.
How do I know what to remodel? One room vs. the whole home debate
Should the client or should you remodel one room or the whole home? Besides the obvious budget impact of making that decision, the other decisions that roll into that are about continuity of finishes.
What I mean by that: Are your windows all trimmed out the same? Is there different flooring from one room to the next? Wall colors change. You certainly can approach one room and say, “We’re going to remodel the master bath, or the hall bath, or the kitchen, or the basement.” Pick your room. That’s completely fine. Where the interesting part comes in is, say we remodel the kitchen and we change all the flooring throughout the main floor. Say we remodel the kitchen, but we’re also going to change all the base encasing throughout the main floor.
There are ways that you can creatively come up with connecting that room to this room without taking all the finishes out and all the lighting, down to the studs, that kind of thing. Now, there is a time and place for that kind of project, but it’s not every one. It’s amazing what you can do with wall color, case and base, and flooring throughout multiple rooms to tie them all together to create a sense of continuity.
What project will get me the most ROI?
Now, this is a longer video, so hear me out. Forty-some-odd years ago, a company went out with the objective of finding out “do you get your money back?” *Peep a guest appearance from Finnegan the Finest Pooch at this point in the video* What they did is they found two homes in a similar neighborhood that had the same attributes. The four-car two-story, three-car attached garage, or the three-bedroom, one-bath, one-car detached garage.
So whatever it may be, they found two of those homes that are almost in the same neighborhood. One got remodeled, and one didn’t. For the one that was being remodeled, they tracked permits. And they did this nationwide. They tracked permits, and they approached the homeowner and the contractor, and they said, “What did you do, and what did you spend?” They wrote that information down and said, “Thank you.” And the objective for that information was to figure out when and how much of your money do you get back based once so much time that goes past once you remodel a home.
So, they waited sometimes months, sometimes years. And one home sold and one didn’t that was kind of the same thing, and they determined how much the cost and value was based on how much time goes by.
Now, they did this nationwide. Compelling Homes operates in the Des Moines, Iowa area. I don’t care what’s happening in Seattle or Ithaca, New York. What I care about is in Des Moines Metro. So, from the years 2013-2020, about seven or eight years, depending on how you do it, it takes about seven years to get more than 90% of your investment dollar back once you remodel. Now, there’s all kinds of fine print and asterisks underneath that. That is, there’s a difference between remodeling your home and really dramatically customizing your home with paisley wallpaper and black and white floors. You’re not going to get your money back then.
The number one fastest ROI? A new front door. Believe it or not, if you spend between $2200 and $5-6000 putting in a new front door, your house is immediately worth that much more money. The other one that’s instant in the Des Moines area is a covered deck. Especially if you’ve got a house where the deck is on the west side of the house, it just bakes in the afternoon and early evening.
If you invest the $20,000 to $60,000, whatever it is based on the size of the deck, to put the roof in, that is instant ROI. The other ones take a little time. That is, kitchens, basements, bathrooms, and home additions. It takes about seven years, but if you invest in your home and you remodel your home and do not sell it immediately, that’s a repair.
What we like to tell people is: if you're going to stay in your home for a minimum of seven years, that’s when you’re going to see about 90% of your return on investment, should you decide to sell the home after remodeling it.
Should I care more about making my home right for me or resale?
One of the questions we get asked is, “Should we design our home for us, the family who lives in it, or should we be more inclined to make decisions for the resale?” The best answer I can give you is both, right? I don’t want to sound non-committal, so let’s go through it.
Compelling Homes really strives to make homes classic as well as in line with the people who live inside it. It’s bespoke. It’s tailored. It’s personal. We can help you make decisions to create an environment you can thrive in, where you can be the best version of yourself. That is a real description of what we do.
And we can also provide guidance, or buoys, or lines to say, if you stay between here, these are going to be classic, wonderful, relatable decisions, and we can really lean into that without doing things that are ostentatious. When we start getting into things that are just so personal and over-the-top that a lot of people would come in and say, “This just really isn’t for me.” We can go bold. We can go big, while working with you to determine what is it that you are turned on by this bizarre or flamboyant finish. We can work with that to come up with color, textile, profile, shape, whatever it may be, and make the home personal, make it tailored to fit you without creating this monstrosity, or perhaps something that’s just distasteful. That’s not the objective.
So, there’s a balance between the two, but we’re of the opinion that we want to create an environment where you can be the best version of yourself. And that is a tailored and unique space for the people that live inside of it. We’d love to help you out. I hope that answers the question.
What if I’m outgrowing my house? Should I just move?
A question I get asked frequently is, “Can we figure out a way to alleviate this? We’re popping at the seams! We’ve outgrown our existing home." And the question is: do we and buy new, or build new, or do we renovate? Because we need the fourth bedroom or the fifth bedroom. We need a home office. We just can’t fit everybody here in the kitchen. We’ve got three cooks and one butt kitchen, as we like to say.” The answer is, maybe.
Maybe the home is too small. We need to do an addition. While a great project, this is not necessarily an end-all-be-all solution for making your home function the way you need it to by making it larger. I like to take a look at the area inside of your home that you’re cleaning, paying taxes on, heating and cooling, and not using. So, one of the big questions we get it, “I live in the city of Johnston, and I’ve got a three-bedroom home, but I need four. But if I do that, I have to move out the west side of Adel, which changes my school district and my daughter and/or son is just starting high school. They’ve got their friend base. We don’t want to change that. I hear you. Totally. I get it.
We can take a look at your home and manipulate, change things. How can we figure out a way to create that space inside your home? It’s very possible. We’ve done everything from the obvious basics, finishing the lower level, or, take a look at the garage, which most likely, seldom has living space over the garage. Add living space over the garage, add onto the garage, push the house into the garage, there’s lots of ways to be creative to solve that problem.
Why Compelling Homes?
The same reason that Compelling Homes wants to take on a client, and that is, we feel as though it’s somebody who we can work with. Here’s the big secret, the big reveal. If you’re looking for a remodeling contractor to come into your home, dismantle your home to the point where there are wires hanging out of the ceiling, drywall, and insulation, that window’s coming, the flooring is ripped up, the fireplace no longer works, clearly, in that environment, on some random Tuesday morning when this is happening to your home, you want someone you can trust. Someone you can communicate with. Someone you vibe with. That’s it.
We strongly recommend hiring a remodeling contractor that you understand, that you get. You get the process. You get the people. It’s laid out. Everything’s in writing. They understand everything from pricing to design to conflict management to realistic schedules to understanding what emotional state you, the client, are going to be in at certain phases of construction. So, we tell all of our clients, when drywall comes, it’s an emotional low. At drywall, you’re a certain amount of weeks into the process. You’re about halfway done, and it’s been rough. It’s been dusty, and there’s been debris that we’ve cleaned up. There’s all these decisions about, “Where does the switch go?”. The drywall comes. And it’s dirty, and it’s loud. And it’s dusty, and we’re changing out the furnace filter. That’s the emotional low. And we know that. So, we prepare our clients for that mark. If we can tell you that’s when you’ll be at your emotional low, kind of predicting the future, that certainly helps.
So when we come out of drywall and you start to see the pretty. The cabinets start showing up and trim starts taking place. There’s a whole shift when you can start to see things moving along. We also know when you’re going to be at your emotional high.
All of this to say, when you’re speaking with a remodeling contractor of your choice, and say we walk in the door, look for that vibe. Look for that connection. That yup, I want to work with you; I want to work for you. And you’re thinking to yourself, “Yeah. These are people that get us. They get our process. They get who we are. We can work together.” And then the bad days don’t happen. It’s learning who you’re working with. We call it a marriage. You know, we’re going to be in your house for a little while. If you can get there with your remodeling contractor of choice, hire them.
What can I expect this to cost me?
I want to quickly talk about money. It’s a topic worth mentioning. A rough and cut way of asking the question is, “What’s the least expensive home remodel one can do?” From my seat, the chair that I sit in every day, my answer is, I don’t know. That’s Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Mendard’s, and those businesses are around for the DIYer. I think it’s great. If a client wants to take on a renovation on small or a renovation on large, I encourage the entrepreneurial spirit. Get it done.
We offer design-build, white-glove service all the way through. We are design professionals. We are construction professionals. We’re remodeling specialists. We offer the systems, the processes, to take someone from, “I don’t know what. I don’t even know who to call. I don’t know what I want. My home isn’t working.” all the way through production and maintaining a three-year warranty on everything we touch.
Now, there is a floor. What can we get involved in? I’m going to throw some numbers out there. Hall bathrooms in Johnston, Waukee, Urbandale, Ankeny, Clyde, West Des Moines, everything out everything in starts in the low $30,000s. That’s going to be total turn-key, top to bottom.
Kitchens, in the same cities that I mentioned, if we’re going to go into a kitchen, take the flooring out, all of the cabinets, take the bulkhead out, change the lighting, put together a beautiful kitchen, projects like that start right around $60,000 and go up.
Primary bathrooms also start around $50,000 and go up.
Whole floor main renovations start in the low $100,000s. That’s something where you’re going to go into a Des Moines two-story and knock down a wall to the dining room and all the kitchen, and the fireplace, and the built-ins, and the flooring, and the paint, and the trim, and the powder room, and the stair system. Yeah, those start in the low $100,000s.
I wanted to throw some thresholds out there with what a quality design-build firm can do, and those are some good numbers to get your head wrapped around. Thanks for listening. I’m Rusty with Compelling Homes. As always, it’s a great day!
Let's Connect and Make Some Magic
At Compelling Homes, we understand the importance of making very personal decisions when it comes to remodeling your home. We’ve got the chops to advise and execute your vision, no matter how nuanced. If you’re ready to talk details about your proposed home renovation in Des Moines, we’re thrilled to meet you. Let’s soar beyond good enough and build something compelling together.
