We do a lot of remodeling, and I've done a lot of remodeling for myself with my own hands, not with contractors. So, I'm very sensitive to these questions. The hardest thing to do is budget, how much you're really willing to spend. How much can you spend? That's the pragmatic side of it. The emotional side of it, when you decide you want to remodel, is be sure you know what you need. Having a list, what I call a wish list or a laundry list, of all the things you'd like to do is best. I'd like to have a bigger kitchen. I'd like to have a bigger bathroom. I'd like to have a Jacuzzi or something. That's a wish list. Then, there's what I call a laundry list which is all the things that you need to have; in other words, right now the shower leaks, you have to fix that. When I redo it, do I want a shower with a steam room? Do I want a shower that's got a bench? Do I want to be able to shave in the shower? Do I want a tub next to it? Those are the things that are a combination of just a wish and then a need. So having a list and knowing what you really need to do and what you want to do is important. And then the budget, I'm going to expand a little bit. We do this a lot; I call it the Sunday Classified Test. If you or a customer have a house, and they're not sure what they need, most people aren't, they don't do it very often. That's why they ask for people to help them have it done. I have done this a lot for myself, so I'm sympathetic to it. I tell the people to imagine, particularly the budget, and this is probably about more substantial budgets than just a kitchen remodel, for example. But people really want to remodel their whole house or add on or something. Usually, it's because they've outgrown it or they bought something, and it's really not big enough. They bought it at a good price to add on, but most people have just outgrown it. They need more space. So I tell them to make a list of the things they need and things you want it to do. We'll help you briefly, not full drawings. Get them to a point where you can see. It will cost this much to make these changes and then you do the newspaper test. You look at how much that costs. Add it to how much you owe. What's the monthly payment going to be? Then, you think about all the misery you're gonna go through to get there. Then, look at the Sunday newspaper, and take that same house payment and drive around and look and see what is available in the neighborhood you want to be in. See what you can get that's already like that. In a way, I'm talking myself out of a job. I'm not telling them, "Oh yeah, let me remodel your house," which of course we want to, but it makes people look at it pragmatically. The things that are emotional are "I love the neighborhood. My kids play next door. The school is down the road." But you can understand what else is out there and what you're gonna get for what you spend. At the end of that, sometimes people say, "Well, for this much money I could buy a house that's got it all," or "I could build a new house" or whatever. Most of the time, people come back and say that they still want to remodel. They still want to do it, but they have a better feel for what the scope of value is to what they're doing. That's a long way of answering, "What's the most important thing to consider," but that's really, the first meeting I have with people. I tell them that story, and get them to start thinking about if they spend 75,000 dollars on their kitchen. It doesn't much matter what it would bring back on the market tomorrow, because they're not gonna sell it. It won't bring back 100 percent, but in five years it will. If they're gonna stay there five years, they pretty much can do whatever they want, unless the entire economy crashes. So it's a good value. They can consider selling their house and buying something else, or staying there and spending a lot of money.
