If you are considering a home improvement, don't wait for warm weather to book the work.

The housing market is producing incentives to complete home improvements. By spring, it could be tough to find a professional home-improvement contractor with an opening.

The direction the market is headed could make it easier for you to find a home for sale this spring, but fixing up instead of moving up could be a more affordable choice.

In Silicon Valley, the number of closed sales on single-family detached homes fell 21 percent to the second-lowest January sales on record since 1998, according to Creekside Realty broker/owner Richard Calhoun's "Bay Area Real Estate Market Newsletter," which is comprised of statistics from the area's multiple listing service, RE InfoLink of Campbell.

During the same period, falling sales nearly doubled condo inventories and boosted single-family home inventories by more than 44 percent.

Yet even as sales fell and inventories swelled, home prices barely budged off record highs.

The median price for single-family homes was $740,000 in January, down from the $760,000 first set in the spring of 2005. The median for condos, however, was a new high, $500,000.

Too much home price inflation eventually gives buyers vertigo, forcing them to sit on the fence until the world stops spinning.

Sellers, on the other hand, tangle with inertia. The momentum of home prices rising 52 percent since 2000--most of it in the past three years--makes it tough for them to grasp pricing homes to reflect the changing market.

It won't get any easier in the spring, traditionally the big selling season. Chances are, the last vestiges of the seller's market will be out in force trying to squeeze what's left out of a housing bubble that did everything but pop.

Interest rates, already on the rise, are expected to add to the prohibitively high cost of housing or offset any minimal price declines.

Certainly, the housing market appears to be shifting from a seller's market to a buyer's market, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's time to buy.

For those who already own a home, fixing up instead of moving up can be a better option.

"The red-hot real estate market has been the object of most people's attention in recent years, but as home resales start to cool off, remodeling will likely become the next real estate big thing," says Bruce Hahn, president of the American Homeowners Foundation.

Here's why:

* You can't afford to move. Add up the commissions, the costs to prepare your home for market and other expenses associated with selling your home. Figure the costs to buy a new home--a new mortgage, closing costs, moving costs and others. Unless you plan to tear down your old home and rebuild it from the foundation up, improving is typically cheaper than moving.

* Your home can afford the work. For most homeowners who purchased a home two, three or four years ago, your home likely has enough equity to tap for a major improvement, say a room addition or even a second story to give you the added space you might seek in a move-up home. Plow equity back into your home in the form of home improvements, and you'll likely reap a return (in increased home value) that's greater than the cost of the loan.

* It's time to feather your nest. If you are like 83 percent of homeowners aged 45 and older, according to AARP, you would like to retire in place and remain in your current home.

Unfortunately, you may be more prepared for retirement than your home is. Longtime homeowners live in homes that are in greater need of maintenance and modifications that help keep older homeowners more comfortable, and in many cases safer.

Along with baby boomers preparing their homes to retire in place, young families expecting their first child or maturing families sending kids to school all experience a change of life that warrants reconfiguring the home to fit a new lifestyle.

* The worst can happen. Bulking up your home with earthquake retrofits, fire-resistant designs and materials and flood control measures build in emergency preparedness that help ensure your survivability when Mother Nature unleashes her fury.

* You'll get some money back. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 will pay you in the form of tax credits for performing certain energy- efficient home improvements. You'll have to act fast because the current provisions only allow the credits for 2006 and 2007.

The total tax credit you can earn over the two-year period, $500, is available for upgrading heating and air conditioning systems, insulation, windows, doors and thermostats, caulking leaks, installing pigmented metal roofs and for otherwise putting the bite on energy waste in your home. Two more federal provisions will give you a tax credit of $2,000 each for solar panels and for solar water heating equipment, provided the systems are not used to heat a pool or hot tub.

There's even more for Californians. The "California Solar Initiative" rebates up to a third of the cost of a photovoltaic solar panel array installed to generate electricity.

Real estate writer Broderick Perkins, executive editor of San Jose-based DeadlineNews.Com, writes regularly for this newspaper.