Pouring Cash Into the Bath

Every home seller who's serious about the job knows that scrubbing, de-cluttering, and all manner of primping are mandatory. But how far should you go in making expensive repairs to a bathroom?

Buyers pay a lot of attention to bathrooms. They know it's expensive to remodel, and they're mightily turned off by disrepair. And plenty of homes in this area have bath tiles in horrid hues of yellow, pink, blue and green that cry out for replacement.

A bathroom rehab can move to the top of the to-do list when other parts of the home have already been updated. Buyers tend to expect that a whole house is of similar quality.

If you have already updated the kitchen and other parts of the house, a shabby, old bathroom can stick in buyers' memories, turning your lovely, reasonably priced home into the one shoppers remember as "the house with the ugly blue tiles."

But is it worth remodeling just to help along a sale?

A full bathroom remodeling is expensive, even if you stick to basics. In the Washington area, a modest renovation costs $16,028 (1.5 percent more than the national average) and recovers $12,932 through a higher resale value, according to an annual study done by Remodeling magazine. That means you recover only about 81 percent of the investment. The magazine defined such a project as updating a typical 5-by-7 foot bathroom without moving walls. Finishes are nice, but not lavish, including a new porcelain-on-steel tub with walls around the tub covered with four-inch square tiles. The bathroom includes a vanity with a solid-surface top (such as Corian) and an integral sink, ceramic tile floor, and a recessed medicine cabinet with light. In other words, it's a nice, clean, new bathroom.

Frills cost much more. Remodeling magazine reports a cost of nearly $52,000 for expanding that typical 35-square-foot bathroom to 100 square feet and outfitting it with such luxuries as a whirlpool tub, a shower with body sprays, separate toilet compartment, custom cabinets, heated floor tiles and heated towel bars. Upon resale, that kind of job, which wouldn't be an uncommon level of luxury for the master bath, recovers 73 percent of the money invested.

You would be foolish to sink $50,000 into a bathroom just to enhance a home's resale value. But what about the more down-to-earth $16,000 investment? After all, it's not uncommon now to cut your price by that amount if the house hasn't drawn any offers. Should you leave the price alone and put the money into a rehab?

"I wouldn't do that, to be honest with you," said Anita Centofanti, a Long & Foster agent in Bethesda. "I think it's very speculative for a seller to put a lot of money into a property in today's market without knowing if it will be to everyone's taste."

That's not to say you can just leave a shabby bathroom alone. Centofanti says all bathrooms must be "serviceable and clean."

Re-caulking and cleaning the grout around the tub are pre-sale jobs necessary for almost all homes. And other fixes, short of a full overhaul, can help you get that serviceable and clean look without spending a bundle.

Centofanti is a fan of refinishing worn bathtubs and even the old ceramic tiles surrounding the tub. A Kensington refinishing company, Miracle Method, charges about $1,190 to apply an acrylic finish to the tub and the three walls around it. (If refinishing has been done before, tack on another $125 to strip off the old finish.) Refinishing a tub only, without the surrounding tiles, costs about $495.