First Person: Upgrades on New Construction Cost Us Thousands Upon Resale

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The first house we ever owned was a 3-bedroom floor plan that we chose to build in a cookie-cutter neighborhood in Florida. We were so excited to go through the process of new construction. There were numerous choices to make - tile, carpet, padding, appliances, countertops, paint color, window treatments, and so on. These decisions had to be made in one day. Yep, we spent a single, very draining day in the design studio of our homebuilder, trying to figure out what we should upgrade and what we should leave alone.

You see, we were anticipating (even at that beginning stage) the features that would add value to our home for resale purposes. After all, this was our beginner home. It wasn't our dream home. Yet, we wanted to be comfortable in it while we lived there. And, it needed to have certain upgrades included or it wouldn't attract any buyers when the time cameso we thought. But, we could not have anticipated what ultimately happened with the housing market crash of 2007. Essentially, the "extras" that we put into the house - and paid for with a higher mortgage - were quite possibly the reason why we didn't come close to breaking even on the sale of that home.

There were several things that we upgraded during that "decision day" that I can almost guarantee were of no importance to the person who bought our house. We paid for more padding under the carpet; we chose 42" cabinets in the kitchen; we opted for double front doors with glass inserts; we picked cultured marble countertops for the master bathroom; and we sprung for a better quality washer and dryer. All of these upgrades (and some that I'm forgetting) cost us a total of $30,000 above and beyond our base package.

When the time came to sell the house, it took 13 months for a buyer to come along. At that point, the housing bubble had popped and people were trying to (and could) steal houses out from under you. Our particular buyer not only didn't care about the extra nice padding we put under the carpet, he wanted a check for the cost of replacing the carpet with tile. You can see how the situation of selling our home became frustrating rather quickly. We thought we were on to something with our upgrades, but the timing was all wrong. It wouldn't have mattered if a Porsche were included in the sale of our home, the one and only buyer that wanted our house wanted it for the cheapest he could get it.

In the end, we had to write a rather large check at the closing. In fact, it wasn't much more than the cost of the upgrades themselves. We always say that had we not done those special extras, we might not be so far behind in our savings plan right now. Had we stuck with the standard options included in the original package, we may not have had to write a check at all!

*Note: This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Do you have a real estate story that you'd like to share? Sign up with the Yahoo! Contributor Network to start publishing your own finance articles.

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