Patti Boyd thought she wanted a newer house until she ventured into Howard County's real estate market - and at least half the places she looked at sold in a day or two.
Fed up with the frenzy, she is sticking with her 32-year-old Columbia home and making a few changes: gutting the basement, fixing the foyer, adding a bathroom, building a family room, moving the laundry room, redoing the siding and replacing the windows.
People are renovating in Howard County like never before, propelled in part by escalating home prices and speedy sales in Baltimore's most expensive suburb.
"In the past, we would slow down around January or February," said Debbie Cossentino, administrator for Cossentino and Sons Remodeling & Design Inc. in Marriottsville, which is working on Boyd's house. "I remember one year, my husband was out trying to dig out whatever he could to get a job. But now we never stop going. We're booked."
The county issued 841 permits for major home improvement projects last year, nearly double the 469 in 1996, according to the Baltimore Metropolitan Council. Residents spent an average of $31,600 per project last year, a total of $26.6 million - not counting relatively inexpensive jobs such as painting.
All this in a place where eight out of 10 homes were built after 1970.
Planners believe - and hope - the trend will not stop anytime soon. Land for new homes in Howard County will be gone in roughly 20 years, they estimate, and a booming improvement business strikes them as a good sign.
"It's helping to stabilize these older communities," said Joseph W. Rutter Jr., the county's planning director. "There's reinvestment that's happening before the communities become slums and [need] urban renewal. We're having an ongoing process of maintaining and updating."
A downside is that the county's remodeling boom contributes to the rise in house prices, which are quickly escalating beyond the reach of many.
The typical Howard home - condos, townhouses and houses averaged together - sold for $272,000 in September, a 22 percent increase from the same month last year, according to the Maryland Association of Realtors.
Less than 5 percent are worth less than $100,000, according to Census 2000 estimates.
"Anything that adds to the cost of existing housing does create problems," said Leonard S. Vaughan, the county's housing administrator. "Housing is becoming less and less affordable to more people."
But Vaughan figures the cost of housing would go up even without remodeling - and Rutter argues that the solution is not community decay. He thinks it is healthy when residents voluntarily improve older neighborhoods.
"It's an attitude of the owners that it's worth reinvesting, and it builds on itself," he said.
Residents who do not remodel are sometimes replaced by people who will. Sellers have felt less pressure to do major work - updating 1950s kitchens, for example - because buyers are often willing to take care of it them- selves, said Ilene Kessler, a Columbia real estate agent for 18 years.
"What do you do?" said Kessler, who estimates that half of her clients are planning to renovate, some by immediately taking out second mortgages. "The buyer looks at a home and says, 'That would be nice, and I'll do x, y and z to improve it.' That's just a phenomenon of lack of buildable lots and new-home building."
The land shortage has also pushed some builders into new territory. Allan Homes in Columbia started a home improvement arm three years ago and finds plenty of work from people who do not want to move. Out of about 40 projects a year, a few invariably are whole-house, top-to-bottom jobs, said Jim Brumsted, director of operations for the company's remodeling offshoot.
A surprising number of people want to renovate newer abodes - a sure sign of buying power, because a new Howard County detached house can easily cost a half-million dollars.
"Most of them are breakfast nook and sunroom additions to the kitchen," said Michael Owings, president of Owings Brothers Contracting in Eldersburg. "I see a lot of remodeling and additions to newer homes in the Howard County area, more than I do in other areas."
Boyd, a legal specialist in real estate development, found plenty to like about the newer homes she saw with her husband on the open-house circuit in the spring. What she did not like was having to make up her mind on the spot.
"When we really sat down and thought about it, we decided we could have the best of both: We could stay where we are but have some of the newer amenities," she said.
Their overhaul is not cheap - more than $100,000 - and the upheaval is a little bit like moving. "We had to pack most of the house up," Boyd said, laughing, and she has been without a laundry room for a month.
But when the work ends next month, her family will have a mostly new house without leaving Thunder Hill, where the streets are lined with towering trees no new subdivision can match.
"We'll enjoy this for years," Boyd said.