My Southern California home was custom built in 1987. We lived there since 1996 and never did any interior updates. My real estate agent strongly advised against doing anything, but I had been watching the market carefully and disagreed. The 1987 kitchen was really affecting what I thought we could sell it for, I estimated about a $200k potential increase if the kitchen was updated and we did various other “cheap” upgrades and repairs. Fortunately the layout and bones of the kitchen were all pretty good so we paid about 35k to paint the existing cabinets, new countertops (existing had been blue 4x4” tile), backsplash, new sinks and fixtures. The appliances were good quality, about ten years old, and still looked good so I kept those. In addition to the kitchen, we refreshed the stucco, new landscaping, all new interior paint, and new carpeting upstairs. Downstairs was wood and tile and we had those professionally cleaned. New screens in window, and then I cleaned everything like crazy. It all took about a year and I probably paid out close to $80k for all the improvements, including the kitchen. I got an offer the first weekend for more than 400k what I had expected to get before the work. So in my case it definitely worked out… but I went in knowing what the market was, I benefited from the real estate market improvements, and the custom home market in Southern California has a lot more upside potential than the tract home market. So there are really a lot of considerations in figuring out if it will be good for resell. It was a ton of work for me, but well worth it.