What price for happiness

Home Style Magazine – January 2007
“What Price For Happiness,” by Patricia Rivera

Excerpt from Home Style Magazine:

Leave the cost-benefit analysis to the number crunchers and consider this: Even a minor bathroom remodel can boost your personal satisfaction index a gazillion percent. What are you waiting for?

Researchers at Remodeling magazine, have long found that remodeling a bathroom gives homeowners one of the highest value-vs.-cost ratios of all home-improvement projects.

Before they get too carried away with plans for a new bathroom, designers are quick to warn their clients that the cost of redoing this small space can quickly spiral upward.

Less than $1,000

Toronto-based interior design expert Debra Gould, who is also known as The Staging Diva, boasts that she can give a bathroom a complete makeover for $500.

In fact, by just changing towels (color-coordinated, of course), a new shower curtain, adding flowers and a fresh coat of paint, she says she can even create a new bathroom in a single day.

“Many bathrooms look ugly or tired, but the expensive items are basically there,” she says. “You just need to add the details.”

Experts agree that one of the easiest ways to create a stylish bathroom is with coordinated metal finishes. Faucets vary widely in price, but many attractive ones fall below $200 at any nearby hardware store. Once you select a style, look for matching accessories with the same finish: towel bars, soap dishes, knobs, faucets and even decorative pieces.

Other simple solutions that complete the picture include changing outdated light fixtures. For some reason, new lighting isn’t one of the top jobs on most consumers’ remodeling To-Do lists. Gould reports that many homeowners she’s worked with have stuck with the same Hollywood-style rack lighting that once was the pinnacle of style and a staple in countless suburban cookie-cutter homes. She suggests swapping them for halogen lights, which more closely resemble natural sunlight.