@Mike9241 wrote:
2. Home improvements and repairs
If you renovated a few rooms to make your home more marketable (and so you could fetch a higher sales price), you can deduct those upgrade costs as well. This includes painting the house or repairing the roof or water heater. But there’s a catch, and it all boils down to timing. “If you needed to make home improvements in order to sell your home, you can deduct those expenses as selling costs as long as they were made within 90 days of the closing
No. You took a common quote from many real estate web sites and expanded it to cover situations that are not covered.
The quote is “If you needed to make home improvements in order to sell your home, you can deduct those expenses as selling costs as long as they were made within 90 days of the closing." This is true, but the key word is improvements. This quote says nothing about repairs. You added that yourself. And improvements are added to the cost basis no matter when they are made, not just within 90 days of the sale. (There is no actual difference between "adding improvements to the cost basis" and "deducting them from the sales price.")
In contrast, "fix up" expenses are specifically not part of the cost basis since 1997. See this article for example.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fixing-up-expenses.asp
See also here
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/home-ownership/home-improvements-and-your-taxes/L6IwHGrx6
