NATION – With extra time spent at home during the pandemic, more Americans took an interest in fixing up or upgrading their houses.
In fact, average household spending on home services increased to $13,140, up from $9,080 in 2019. Did this increased activity lead to more informed homeowners when it comes to home improvement costs? With higher demand and construction material shortages, home services pricing has been unpredictable. It’s as important as ever that homeowners know how much home renovations might cost before taking on new projects.
Failing to properly budget for home upgrades can wreak havoc on homeowners’ wallets, so we surveyed over 900 people to learn more about their outlook on home improvement and how accurately they estimate various projects. We then compared the results with HomeAdvisor’s true cost data and used the insights from the survey to provide budgeting tips to help homeowners prepare for their home services spending in 2022.
Key Findings:
• 65% of Americans find home maintenance projects at least somewhat stressful.
• Less than one in 10 people feel improving their home’s energy consumption is a top benefit of home maintenance projects.
• When estimating popular home improvement costs, more than 25% of people underestimate interior painting costs, 24% severely underestimate landscaping costs and 40% underestimate window installation costs.
• Nearly two in three Americans find Home Maintenance stressful. In order to get a sense of people’s outlooks on taking on new projects around the house, we first asked 900 Americans how stressed a home maintenance project would make them feel. We found that 65% of Americans find the idea of taking on a home maintenance project at least somewhat stressful, including 15% who admit to feeling “very stressed” about such an endeavor.
Home maintenance projects require planning, logistics, spending, and meticulous execution, so it’s understandable that most people feel some degree of stress when taking on a new project. Men are more likely to find home maintenance “not at all” stressful. When looking at respondents’ outlooks by gender, we found that men were more likely than women to say they would not be stressed at all by a home maintenance project – 58% compared to 43%.
What Is the Top Benefit of Home Maintenance? Home projects require an investment of time and money. To find out what inspires people to commit to home spending, we asked 947 Americans what they perceive to be the top benefit of home improvement projects. Nearly three in 10 Americans say improving function is the top home maintenance benefit. According to our survey respondents, improving a home’s function and completing necessary repairs are the top benefits of home maintenance projects – with 29% of people agreeing.
Behind completing necessary repairs, improving home value (25%), and improving home comfort (15%) were the second and third most popular perceived benefits of home maintenance projects, respectively. Interestingly, a 2019 Angi survey also found that the top reason people listed for home improvement spending was to replace or repair a problem. So perhaps, while home spending has increased year over year, people’s motivations have remained steady.
Improving energy consumption was not a top reason people pursue home improvement projects. In fact, just 8% of respondents identified it as such. This could be cause for concern, given that residential energy consumption accounts for roughly 20% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and the average household spends $250 per year in wasted energy alone.
Cutting back on energy consumption can make a huge difference not just on homeowners’ wallets, but also on the amount of fossil fuels that are burned each day. For example, if every American household swapped one incandescent light bulb for an efficient compact fluorescent lamp, it would produce the same reduction in carbon emissions as taking 1.3 million cars off the road.
Next, we asked our respondents to estimate the costs of three popular home improvement projects: interior painting, landscaping and window installation. Here’s what we found. Despite Popularity, Over 1 in 4 Americans underestimate interior painting costs. HomeAdvisor’s Annual State of Home Spending Report found that interior painting has been the most popular home improvement project during the pandemic, with 35% of U.S. households completing such a project in 2020.
– HomeAdvisor
