Could Losing A Bedroom Devalue Your Home?

Sometimes the layout of your home may not suit your lifestyle. It is tempting to rush for the pickaxe and hammer to demolish walls in order to rearrange the space but changing your rooms could have a detrimental effect on the value of your home. Before you make drastic alterations it is always worth considering if they would put off potential buyers and if they can easily be undone.

Dilemma

I was recently faced with just this dilemma. I have a four bedroom house with plenty of space but I don’t need four bedrooms. What I really needed was a walk in wardrobe as my partner and I were using the cupboard space in two of the bedrooms to store our things. The smallest room in the house was conveniently situated next to the master bedroom and so creating my walk in wardrobe would be an easy task. All we needed to do is take out the fitted cupboards and create an access door in the exposed wall but would losing our fourth bedroom make selling the house more difficult in the future?

Family Home

Four bedroomed houses are often purchased by families but when I looked at the people living in similar properties on my estate not all of them had children. In some cases it might have been a case of not having children yet as the couples concerned were young but this gave me an idea. If we created the wardrobe room in such a way that it could easily be changed back to a bedroom perhaps the lack of a fourth room would not put people off. In addition there may be couples like us who would want the wardrobe and as it had direct access from the master bedroom it could make a fabulous nursery. With the removal of any hanging rails and the addition of nursery furniture the small room would be the perfect place for a new baby.

Demolition

With these thoughts in mind we did indeed decide to demolish the rather ugly fitted cupboards, knock a hole in the wall and install a door but we left the original door from the landing in place. This way the room could be left as a wardrobe, used as a nursery or returned to a conventional bedroom very easily.

New Layout

The results have been spectacular to say the least. We now have a much larger master bedroom in the absence of the fitted cupboards and a wonderful place to store our clothes. I like the new layout so much that I do believe it was worth the effort for the improved lifestyle even if we have to offer to fill in the new door for prospective purchasers in the future. I hope that this is one occasion on which the conventional wisdom regarding not losing a bedroom could prove to be wrong.

The future

I have also discovered that demolition is addictive. We have now rid ourselves of the fitted cupboards in the guest room too despite the fact that these monstrosities are supposed to be a selling point. The room looks considerably larger and much more elegant and so I can only hope that the reduced storage space will not prove to be an obstacle to a future sale.

I now believe that there are situations where changing your home to suit your lifestyle and tastes will not seriously impact on its future value but I won’t know for sure until it is time to sell. As I now really love my house it may be a long time before I want to move!