When we did our kitchen (normal size) it was 120K. It had a lot of bells of whistles (multiple fridge drawers and a large fridge, chef’s stove). I no longer own the house. When I was looking for an apartment to buy, to have a completely renovated kitchen and bathrooms were on top of my list. My kitchen is small now (gallery), but it has a subzero and a bosche dishwasher. I found out the seller had spent few hundred thousand to renovate the apartment. He certainly get his investment back.
@Gourmetmom you comment about loving to near the water caught my eye. Have you earnestly looked with a realtor for what is available? What a wonderful exchange that could be - to MAYBE give up a little space but get something nice near the water!
What you are talking about doing is a good amount of work and time involved. Maybe you can find it done or close to done somewhere ON THE WATER! 
@MaineLonghorn “Now…as long as it’s green, it doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s clover!”
Amen to that. My husband (the lawn’s his job) has noticed one of our strips of grass in the back yard is being overtaken by clover. He looked into it, and read on two sites, “why on earth do you want to get rid of clover? Grass you don’t have to mow!”
I’m starting to replace my lawn with flowers. I figure, if I’m going to use water (I live in the usually parched West) it’s going toward something that gives me more satisfaction than boring old grass.
My next door neighbors went a step farther: they converted their entire FRONT lawn into a huge vegetable and fruit garden.
There’s a house that’s on my way to the train station that is a wonderful mix of flowers and vegetables. It’s quite a steep slope and is sort of terraced. It looks fabulous.
Environmentally, the best thing you can do is plant native trees. Keep a little buffer around your house and let it be anything but turf grass.
Our neighborhood has relatively small lots (.25 acre) with some bigger lots, but only few houses maintain strips of grass in the front yard. The landscaping is a mix of shrubs, flowers (ahhh… dahlias), and ornamental trees. Love that. There is only one house that looks like an eyesore with a small patch of weedy grass in the front… the new owners fixed up the home but let the yard go.
At House1, we never had any grass in the front… it was a rockery with a fountain and a collection of conifers. We did that all by ourselves, and it was our hobby.
@katliamom I’m the one who said they didn’t mind the clover lawn…not @MaineLonghorn
And you know…I don’t. Just like I don’t mind the very nice large weeds that cover a huge slope in front of our house. They are actually the natural plants that grow in this area…and they are really easy to maintain…as they take no maintenance.
We have plantings directly in front of our house on that slope, but not the full length of the yard. Too much work.
I hope my neighbors are not judging my “landscaping”.
An update on my neighborhood woes. I had about 12 large oak trees removed from the front of my property - a long needed improvement. We hired a well-known, very professional tree service to do the work, a company that we’ve used before (our town actually uses this service).
The company sent three trucks - one with a big crane and got the work done in a few hours. Maybe twice in the afternoon, they had to swing a tree across the road and so they stopped the traffic for a few minutes - it was less than five minutes each time. They had someone dedicated to directing the very small amount of traffic that goes by my house (18 houses and not a through road - it’s a one way circle). They could not have done a better job and were super professional.
Anyway, this morning I saw that my across the street neighbor sent me an email about midnight last night (he’s the self-appointed de facto “president” of our little homeowners association) to tell me that a whole bunch of neighbors called him to complain about my tree removal. He asked me to talk to him about it the next time I do such work. I went back and forth with him a couple of times and said that I was really surprised that anyone would complain about a few minutes inconvenience, especially when they could see the men were really hustling to get the job done.
After thinking about it for a few hours, I decided that probably no one complained. It was all him, most likely, and his house was not even affected since his driveway entrance is before where the work was being done. I told him next time to have them call me and I would deal with it directly.
What a you know what - and his yard is a mess.
How unfortunate to have such a disagreeable neighbor. I suspect you are right that the man created imaginary people complaining. Oh well, glad you don’t have to interact with him frequently!
I’m glad you had a professional crew remove your huge trees–they can be quite dangerous if handled by amateurs! We had a very professional group remove the trees from our front yard as well and are glad we did.
Where I live the neighbors would be fuming if we cut 1 oak tree, much less 12. It wouldn’t have anything to do with traffic; it’s how much we treasure our tree canopies and the beauty they bring to the neighborhood.
Where I live, there would be city employees halting the project pronto. No one would issue a permit for removing 12 trees!
What a PITA neighbor.
These trees do not add beauty or bring anything positive to the neighborhood. They crowd out the beech and pine trees. Several were rotting and hollow inside - at risk for coming down in a storm, not to mention termites. Now that I’ve removed the oaks, the other trees there will grow fuller.
You can’t chop down big trees without permission here either, unless you can prove they are unhealthy. I was at a zoning board meeting and the neighbors were up in arms about an empty lot where they were going to infill with a house and two large trees would be removed!
We used to have that rule in our neighborhood, but it’s heavily wooded and the lots are large, so we changed the bylaws a few years ago so that it’s the discretion of the homeowner. No one has removed an excessive number - these are not good looking trees - tall and scrawny, many growing awkwardly toward the sun.
We needed home owners association approval in our last neighborhood to take down any tree unless it was completely dead.
My new town has a minimum number of tree requirement per lot size.
We live in the woods. Periodically we have to have trees removed because they pose a danger to our house or a neighbors if they were to come down in a storm. We are not in a wetlands area, or within the review area for our lake. Therefore, we can cut trees down on our property whenever we want to.
If a tree is close to a neighbor boundary, we always ask the neighbor what they think.
Lots of tree huggers in this state too…but after Storm Sandy in 2011, folks realized that trees close to their homes posed a danger.
How does anyone know if they aren’t perfectly comfortable paying the mortgage or re financed at the current great rates. They might not care if they don’t get all their money back. Could be looking at inheritances or simply love their home. Value of a mortgage relative to the value effects the net equity and their balance sheet. Which you also have no idea how good that is including deferred compensation 401k and pensions.
The question of upkeep and foreclosure is an income statement concern. Two different profiles.
If they’ve been there for some time they obviously can afford the mortgage.
It’s a piece of the puzzle and I would not sweat it. However it is easier to buy the amenities you desire than renovate from a expense recapture perspective. It’s hard to justify the renovations as a money making opportunity. It’s a cost. It’s a lifestyle choice.
I am always shocked by how leveraged some people are. Me, my mortgage has been paid off for years - I don’t like debt. I have a friend who just purchased a 1.3 million dollar beach house. She said up front I can afford it for 5 years and then I will sell. I have another friend who is 60 and has some thing like 10 years left on his mortgage which he tells me he needs his salary to pay for. People live differently.
Leverage can get you big gains… or big losses.
We bought the largest house in the neighborhood at the time (25 years ago), which was the lower income neighborhood of a very affluent town. Our neighbors were software engineers, people who worked in public radio, etc. We added 1000 sf to the house. Twenty-five years later, our house is nowhere near the largest house in the neighborhood. Small houses were torn down. Larger houses were added to.
I wouldn’t know what our neighbors loan to value ratio is. But, when our kids were growing up, I was surprised at the spending level of our neighbors. They had newer cars than we did and their kids were better dressed and they went on nice vacations. We took nice vacations, but I suspect that I was making twice to 10 times or more what my neighbors made. I wondered if they were saving sufficiently (for college and retirement).
Neighbors being potentially underwater could be a problem for the OP if we hit a rough patch in the economy and there are defaults. I think it would hurt resale value. We had a very modest dip in RE prices in 2008 and things came back quickly and kept on roaring, so at least in one pass, defaults were probably not a big problem in our neighborhood.