I do not know if a fireplace adds value to a home. I can say, anecdotally for me, that I love seeing a fireplace in the home but, when I have lived in homes with them, I almost never used it. Not due to costs but that they are just a pain to clean and the times I want to use them are more rare than I had hoped (e.g. romantic dinner or friends over…those happened but the fire in the fireplace just never really made much sense).
Even growing up we had a fireplace I and think it was used only 1-2 times a year (such as Christmas).
The one time every few years we use our wood burning, beautiful, fireplace is during a low temperature power outage. Way more fun than going to a motel with three dogs.
I would say that if I were fabulously wealthy and had many servants who did whatever I wanted I would have a fire burning in my fireplace all the time. As long as someone else has to deal with the cleanup and keeping it going I’m all for them.
More generally I would say that if I had two houses to choose from and, all else being equal, it came down to one house with a fireplace and costing $10,000 more than the other house without a fireplace I would choose the less expensive house with no fireplace.
My folks had one for years in their added-on family room in their Ohio home. At first the room had its own furnace but at some point they had the furnaced removed and just had the fireplace. Dad is a freezebaby and he loved the fireplace. It worked VERY well to heat the 625sqft room. I forget why they ultimately got rid of it…I think it was leaving residue on the walls or something. Or it was so hot it was messing up the thermostat in the other half of the house (house is only 1800sqft total).
Personally I’m not a fan of fireplaces. I have a neighbor with a tiny house like mine (1010 sqft or so) and their fireplace takes up SO much space. My two friends with condos have gas fireplaces they never use, it just takes up floorspace/wallspace. But yeah they do seem super popular.
That’s it. And as it stands, nearly every day that is cold enough for a fire to be useful also involves atmospheric conditions that make the county ban fires in fireplaces.
I live just north of San Jose. We have a pellet stove and a wood burning fireplace and we haven’t used either for over a decade - over 20 years for the pellet stove.
When I lived in NJ we used our wood burning fireplace all the time so I’m not against them. But it was for the look, not the heat.
Interesting. I got a similar reaction from our renovation company when I said we wanted to remove our bathtub and install an Italian shower. They said it would hurt the resale of the house and that I should consider reinstalling a tub if we ever plan to sell.
Seems like false reasoning to me: a house with a working fireplace might have a slightly higher value compared to a home without one, but once no homes can be sold with a working fireplace, the differential can’t exist.
Yeah fireplace is way different than a good wood/propane stove. My propane stove has a flue that is coaxial. Pipe in a pipe. It draws the air for combustion down the pipe from out side. That air never mixes with the room air.
Air quality is one reason, but overall energy efficiency is another. Traditional masonry fireplaces are terrible heat sinks when they’re not being used because masonry is an awful insulator. It’s even worse because the damper never seals well, so they create drafts too. Prefab fireplaces are also difficult to seal around because of the required clearance to combustible materials, so you can end up with drafts and cold chases. Getting a home LEED certified almost requires you to exclude fireplaces, or at the very least you need to find additional points to compensate for their poor thermal performance (when off AND when on), on top of potential indoor air quality hits. Those ventless gas fireplaces may actually be the worst for indoor air quality because any and all impurities in the gas just go into the air, and the ones that have yellow flames burn less cleanly too.
Any potential home buyer should have the chimney professionally inspected. Soot builds up and can cause a chimney fire. My family had one and my uncle could see the fire between the bricks. It almost caught the attic on fire. He had a metal liner installed afterwards.
I enjoy fireplaces. My parents home had a insert installed, We could see the fire behind the glass doors and there was a fan to circulate the heated air odff the firebox. The lined chimney was professionally cleaned every few years.
I feel that a fireplace adds sale value. It certainly would make the difference if I was considering two similar house.
Personally, I’m surprised more people don’t mind looking up at the TV. To me, it detracts from the “cozy” feeling I want to have when I’m in my own home. It makes me feel like I’m in an airport or doctor’s waiting room or something.
One of the things I hate about this idea that you’re supposed to get rich off appreciation in your house is that you should do renovations/upgrades based not on what you actually want in a house, but on what you think other people would want.
The question is, why does it add value? Is it because that many people actually want a fireplace, or just that everyone thinks everyone else wants one?
Fireplaces are what insurance companies call “ignition sources.” When designing my home I didn’t want a fireplace at all, but I asked a local insurance agent if not having a fireplace would lower my insurance premium. Answer: Yes, by 15 to 20 percent. This guy was convinced that a fireplace was the biggest fire risk to a house.
It might be true that potential buyers will think my place less valuable because it has doesn’t have a fireplace. After 27 years of insurance savings I don’t care. And you can be sure I will mention the insurance savings to a buyer.
And if you have a regular gas fireplace, as opposed to the less-realistic-looking ventless types, you pretty much need to leave the damper open all the time or remove it entirely (some places have laws requiring either no damper or a device to keep it from closing fully). It’s so you won’t forget to open it when you start a fire and kill yourself with carbon monoxide. (That’s less of a concern with wood fires, I guess, since you’d notice your house filling up with smoke.) My folks get around the problem by having a damper that swings open, but they prop it closed with a stick. Not the most attractive look, but gives at least some balance of energy efficiency and safety. I just leave my damper open. We’re all in southern California within an hour of the coast, so no one’s going to freeze to death, but still.
That said, I really, really like my fireplace. When we were house-hunting, I decided it wasn’t quite a dealbreaker, but it was among my highest priorities on the not-quite-a-dealbreaker list. Much like my love of cats, my love of a cozy fire on a rainy day defies any logical arguments you could make for the advantages of not having one. I tried to put a number on it, like if there were two otherwise identical houses I liked, what’s the maximum price I’d pay for the one with a fireplace vs. the one without. But in such a tight market where we were afraid we wouldn’t get anything, it was difficult to conceptualize. I did feel that, if I could afford the fireplace house, I’d choose it no matter how much cheaper the other one was. You just can’t put a price on snuggling a purring ball of fluff in front of a crackling blaze.
Interesting, but both too contemporary for the typical American home buyer where the fireplace is supposed to evoke a cozy/traditional aesthetic, and also too rustic, as generally only the hard-core types who actually want to heat their homes with wood on a regular basis have a stove like that. They also have to be carefully cordoned off with children around, whereas typical fireplaces don’t. Since most standard fireplaces in the US are garbage for heating, they’re mainly for ambiance and aesthetics, including a place to hang the Christmas stockings.
We just moved, one of the requirements for our new home it had to have a fireplace. We did not look at any houses without one. The new home has two fireplaces. The one in the living room has a gas insert that we may use just to enjoy the effect. The one in the “reading room” it gets used. We will light it when my wife and/or me want to just sit and read. Or light it sometimes to sit around it with 2 to 4 friends and just talk.
It is definitely not an emperor’s new clothing phenomenon. My wife had always wanted a home with a fireplace and we are now both retired some years. The subdivision that we moved out several of the homes had fireplaces, and the subdivision was built in 1976.
I mostly agree with you. My last house I added on two times and then remodeled the master bathroom. I did not recover full the cost of my two additions. But it was worth the expenses of the remodels in the life that we had in the improved home. I am a numbers guy and I ran numbers. The cost of remodeling vs buying another home that would be like what our home would be after the remodel. How much would my taxes and mortage payment be. In both cases the monthly amount was less. And we would not have been able to find the kitchen that we ended up with after the remodel. 4X6 island, two sinks, double oven, 6 burner range top, and storage plus. And we got to enjoy this for over 20 years. Now the bathroom not only did that not increase the value of the house possibly decreased value of the house, had to give up closet space in the master bedroom. But went from a 3/4 person bathroom to a two person bathroom with a shower big enough for two people.
Overall all my remodels over priced our house for the neighborhood. Largest house on the largest lot, with AC and a hot 10X10 hot tub two covered patios. House 2300 sq feet. I think the house was worth 1.3M. Problem house around the corner 1200 sq feet sold for 900K. We got 1.1M.
If the buyer really wants one it will add value. WE did not look at any houses without one, this is going to be our last house other than assisted living. If there was two models of the same house the one with a fireplace is going to get more people to look at the fireplace one, that will raise the price. The only time a buyer should consider anything in a house because “everyone else wants one” is if they are going to be a short time owner. Someone who moves often. Or an investor.
Really? Because we did the exact same thing three months ago, and our contractor said that it was a great idea, and that bathtubs were stupid and old-fashioned. True, we were paying him, but he had previously shot down some expensive ideas we had, so I tend to trust his judgement.
Of course, around here bathrooms, kitchens and the like have negligible effect on resale value, because everyone just renovates them anyway. The whole point of owning a home is to rebuild it according to your preferences, and after you’ve paid three quarters of a million for a condo, what’s another $30 grand for renovations?