does house value rise?

I can understand why your wife resents the fact that so much effort (and obviously money) has had to be spent on the house.

Been there/done that - twice now.

I'm in a 1970s house now and really struggle to "get my head round" why a house could have been so neglected/had so little time and money spent on it - considering it had several previous owners (not just one).

But "I put my head down" and got on with doing about 50 years worth of maintenance work at once + putting right things that were old-fashioned already when the house was built.

Having done all that - I want me to be the one that gets the benefit of all my hard work and loadsa money spent. So it makes sense to me that you & your wife give it a couple of years "for the dust to settle" and the resentment at having had to do so much work other people should have done but didnt. There's no point in speculating as to why they didn't do it (ie fulfil their responsibilities is the way I think of it - coming from a home-owning family). It might have been meanness/laziness/illness/lack of money/who knows? - but you have to try and forget the resentment you've had to go through all that and give the house a chance to see if you can "settle" in it once it's up to standard at last and not just move on. I guess it's akin to childbirth - the memory fades into the background of what you've been put through after a while.

After all - a high proportion of our housing stock needs a lot of work on it for one or more of the above reasons to do with previous owners. You could be going "from the frying pan (now cleaned and gleaming) into the fire" and have to go through the whole thing again if you move - and pile on even more resentment at having to do other peoples work for them.

Even a noticeable proportion of brand new houses have problems - due to the way they're being "thrown up" at a rate of knots and many builders arent taking the time/trouble to make sure they are even actually finished before selling them.

Davesnave wrote: »

Money, you don't resent buying a house that needs improvement; you buy it at a reduced price and bring it up to the standard you require.

If you do that, what the previous owner did or didn't do is no concern of yours.

What can be galling is removing perfectly serviceable things in the course of improvements, but again, apportioning blame is unhelpful.

Maybe that depends on whether the money spent could be recovered. Often it cant. I would need to charge £55,000 more than I paid for the house to recover money spent - and that's not taking any account of inflation/house price inflation or anything for my work. I could only charge around £20,000 more for the house than I paid for it = a loss of £35,000 plus house price inflation plus my work done for nothing.

That's the thing about quite a few houses - one can't recover all the money put into doing work on them. Hence the resentment there would be of doing work for free and spending more money than one could ever recover that applies to many houses.

Maybe OP is in a similar situation - rather than a "make a profit from having done that work" situation? Many people are...

moneyistooshorttomention wrote: »

Maybe that depends on whether the money spent could be recovered. Often it cant.....

That's the thing about quite a few houses - one can't recover all the money put into doing work on them. .

The decision to buy, to do the work and choosing the level to which it is done is always the purchaser's.

Therefore, it's wrong to try and pin the blame for that on anyone else.

We've walked away from houses when the figures didn't stack-up. On this one, we had advice so that we knew what we could spend sensibly before starting renovations.

A few of our friends are trapped in houses they can't sell and re-coup what they spent, so they rattle around in them rather than down-size. It was their choice. Like the OP, all they ever saw was prices rising rapidly. Well, since 2007 they haven't really done so here.