Any time you buy a house, it costs you more than you expect. New houses generally require landscaping and window treatments, at the least, and the basic appointments contractors put into them, such as carpets and plumbing fixtures, are usually on the low end and have to be replaced fairly soon. Older houses invariably have hidden costs overlooked by the inspector, fix-ups, and changes you want to do to make the place yours.

Some fix-up and renovation projects are said to be wiser investments than others: kitchen and bathroom upgrades, for example, supposedly come closest to paying for themselves, while adding a swimming pool, finishing a basement, or creating a home office bring the lowest return on investment.

These maxims are probably true when they apply to a house that you don’t intend to live in for any length of time. But personally, I think that if you plan to stay in the house for upwards of eight or ten years, you should do what pleases you and not worry about how much someone else will pay for it. Do heed the obvious advice to avoid over-improving the property for the area—you should never invest more in a house than you can retrieve after some years of real estate appreciation (figure about 6% to 8% a year over a decade). But otherwise, make the house comfortable for yourself.

Because I plan to hold a house at least ten years, I do the improvements I want soon after purchasing. Then I get to enjoy the environment I want to live in, and over the course of ten or fifteen years the increase in the property value will pay for the cost of the improvements, especially if they are things that do not deteriorate or, as in the case of landscaping, that improve with time.

With that in mind, I’ve done some pricey fix-ups: in addition to the usual replacement water heaters, plumbing repairs, lighting installations, and paint jobs, there have been roof jobs, new swamp coolers or air-conditioning units, kitchen appliances, countertops, fences, doors, windows, and on and on.

But among them all, two stand out as having been especially cost-effective over the long run:

Installing Tile Floors throughout the Dwelling

An expensive proposition up front, hard flooring (whether tile, polished concrete, wood, or wood-look laminate) returns your money over the long run.

This is because you can clean any of these without professional help, and they never have to be replaced.

Carpeting, which if you install a quality product is also not cheap, needs to be maintained regularly if it is to last its lifetime, usually around seven to ten years. It should be professionally cleaned once a year, and between those cleanings you should rent a steam cleaner and go over all the carpets yourself—a big and unpleasant job. It must be vacuumed with a high-quality machine, an appliance likely to cost you upwards of $300. Cleaning under a bed or sofa requires you to move heavy pieces of furniture, and  if you’re a single woman you may have to hire a handyman or housekeeper to help.

For a dog owner and an active outdoor person, however, the hard floors soon paid for themselves in another coin: cleanliness.

Keeping a hard floor clean is very, very easy. You never have to call in a professional with heavy equipment to pick up the dirt. When the dog barfs on it, you just wipe up the mess and spray on some disinfectant. When dirt or rainy mud tracks in, you just mop it up. Better yet, a Swiffer, a dust mop, or a vac-broom cleans the dust—and icky dust mites!—out from under the bed in seconds, with no heavy lifting. Dog hair, dust, and dirt settle in (or grind in) to a carpet’s nap, sitting there for years; they vacuum or dust-mop right off a hard floor. And we all know where pet urine goes! So the tile floor is not only easier and cheaper to clean than carpet, you can get it a lot more sanitary.

These considerations are worth a lot. Add them to the seven- to ten-year payback, and you see the cost of installing hard flooring is well worth it.

Xeriscapic Landscaping

But in the low desert, just the water required to keep a grass lawn alive for a month—to say nothing of fertilizers, insecticides, and lawn services or the cost of purchasing and maintaining lawn mowers, weed-whackers, and clippers—will run as much as a summer power bill. To make the lawn thrive and not just sit there looking sickly will cost you lots more.

About the third time I had to dip into my retirement savings to pay the lawn man as I watched the water bill inhale my monthly budget, I knew it was time to get rid of the mangy lawn.

Ripping out a lawn and replacing it with a decent-looking xeriscape is no modest proposition. In my last house, it cost about $4,000. In this house, the cost ran more than twice that, because the previous owner’s nonfunctional DIY watering system had to be replaced and because I had the landscaper build a patio roof and a walled front courtyard and plant nine large trees.

Last month my water bill was $80. I can take care of almost all the yard maintenance myself. About once every 30 to 60 days, a gentleman named Gerardo comes around to do the heavy lifting, and while he’s here he gives the quarter-acre lot a thorough clean-up. Nary a lawn-mower nor a weedwhacker comes on to the property.

In the depth of the summer, when I’m watering something somewhere every day, the water bill comes to about $120—a far cry from the $250 I was paying ten years ago in my old house before I got rid of the grass, and a very far cry indeed from what I would be paying to maintain grass here, at today’s prices.

Exclusive of the extra decorator touches (the walled courtyard with its flagstone paving, the extra flagstone pathway in back, the solid cedar patio overhang), I figure the cost of xeriscaping alone paid for itself in about 18 months. Or less, depending on how much you’d have to spend to keep the lawn alive and whether you hired immigrant or nonimmigrant workers. Over the course of nine or ten years, this represents a very significant savings; and as water prices inevitably soar higher and higher, a professionally installed xeriscape is bound to be a selling point.

And in terms of ego gratification, it’s big: four years later, passers-by still ask me who did the landscape job.

real estate, frugality