New Home Owners Across Nottinghamshire Spend Over £5,000 Making Their House A Home

• 34% of people install a new bathroom or kitchen or change the layout of their house to make it feel more like their home
• 29% of new home owners spend over £5,000
• 34% people take over 50 days to feel at home
• Top tips on how to fast track making a house a home

EMBARGO: embargoed until 00:01 Thursday 27th November 2014

Home owners across Nottinghamshire spend an average of £5,520 to make their house feel like a home according to research from Barratt Homes.

Installing a new kitchen, upgrading the bathroom, or altering the layout of the house were improvements undertaken by more than a third (34%) of new homebuyers to help make their home feel their own.

With these stamps of personalisation often requiring building, decoration or settling in time, 34% only felt at home after 50 days, with more than half of these taking over three months to feel at home after moving in.

Decorating to personal tastes also plays a big part in helping people settle in, with the lounge being the priority room to personalise (56%), followed by the bedroom (17%) and kitchen (10%). This all comes at a cost, with the average home owner spending over £5,000 to turn the property into somewhere they can comfortably call their home.

Moving in milestones

Key moments that help make a house feel like a home:

1. Redecorating (52%)
2. Putting up photos (27%)
3. When the house feels lived in by the whole family (26%)
4. Familiar smells (13%)
5. Once they've hosted their first Christmas (11%)

How to fast-track making a house a home

After the stresses and strains of moving home, leading homebuilder Barratt Homes shares its top tips on how to fast-track the process of making a new property feel homely:

1. Adorn the walls with personal belongings that mean something significant to you – it's important to have old memories in your new surroundings
2. Establish family rituals e.g. Saturday night film night complete with popcorn and treats
3. Spend as much time as possible in your home, become accustomed to its quirks, sounds, smells and how it feels
4. Invite friends and family over - bring fun and familiar people into your new surroundings to begin creating new memories
5. Consider a new build home; the clean blank canvas can fast-track making it feel like home and eliminate expensive DIY or home improvement jobs as everything is already new

Kate Fox, Social Issues Research Centre, commented, "Making a property feel like a home is a really important milestone in establishing an emotional connection with your house or flat. It's a shame to see that this is an expensive and timely process for many recent home owners, making what should be an exciting and special time much more stressful. Prospective buyers should ensure they have considered this aspect before choosing the type of property they want to move into."

Jan Ruston, Sales Director at Barratt Homes North Midlands added, "This research highlights that making a house a home can be a costly and time consuming process for many home owners.

"For those that are keen to avoid this it is certainly worth considering a new build, which eliminates this obstacle and ensures you don't have to spend a large additional chunk of money on top of purchase price. In addition, new builds provide new owners with a blank canvas they can personalise as they like, helping to make it feel like home from the start."

For more information, tips and hints to help navigate the house buying process visit http://www.barratthomes.co.uk/hometruths.

For more information about Barratt Homes' developments across Nottinghamshire, please visit the website at www.barratthomes.co.uk or call 0844 811 3377.

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NOTES TO EDITORS

1) For further information about Barratt Homes please contact Alice Norman or Alex Scoppie, Unsworth Sugden, on 0116 2471777 oralice@unsworthsugden.co.uk or alexs@unsworthsugden.co.uk

2) Research carried out by OnePoll on behalf of Barratt Homes, August 2014, among UK 2,000

3) Barratt Homes is part of Barratt Developments PLC

4) Barratt Group sold 14,838 homes in the year to June 2014, making it the biggest housebuilder by volume in Britain

5) Barratt Group was awarded a maximum five star rating for the fifth consecutive year in the 2014 Home Builders Federation Customer Satisfaction Survey

6) Site managers working for Barratt Group won 90 awards for quality workmanship in the 2014 NHBC Pride in the Job Awards. Barratt has won more Pride in the Job awards than any other housebuilder for the last ten years

7) Barratt Group is the only housebuilder to provide a five year warranty on the fixtures and fittings in its new build homes at the time of purchase