Washington - Cory Laws considered selling his house and moving to an updated property with his girlfriend. But he likes his neighborhood, so he decided to spend as much as $100,000 to remodel the Herndon, Va., home.

"I bought the house for me and my two girls at the time, but they're adults," said Laws, 61, who's rebuilt one room and added mahogany floors to his basement to turn it into a guest apartment. "We're morphing the house into our haven."

Laws is among U.S. property owners providing a boost to the $300 billion home-improvement industry. Spending on renovations may rise to a record this year as homeowners with low interest rates decide to stay put and remodel their existing homes, stimulus programs encourage energy-efficiency upgrades and surging demand for rentals spur landlords to invest in their properties, according to a report released Thursday by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Home improvements and repairs now generate about 1.8 percent of U.S. economic activity, slightly below the average over the past decade. As owners gain equity in their properties and rents continue to rise, "investment in improvements to the nation's housing stock is likely to strengthen," the center said in its study.

Shares of home-improvement chains Lowe's Cos. and Home Depot Inc. have been rising. Lowe's has soared 47 percent in the past year, and Home Depot has surged more than 33 percent.

Growth in the repair-and-remodeling industry in 2015 is likely to match or exceed last year's, Michael Rehaut, a JPMorgan Chase analyst, wrote in a research note Wednesday. The industry should be bolstered by factors such as job growth, improving existing-home sales and the benefit to consumers from the drop in oil prices.

That's no surprise to Laws, who owns a remodeling firm, Details Home Services, in Northern Virginia. He said his business grew 30 percent last year, and he expects the same increase in 2015.

"Everybody is busy," Laws said. "It's hard to get contractors to return calls."

For his own home, Laws is planning an addition to the master bedroom to make room for a large closet, and will turn the current walk-in closet into a laundry room. He's also converting a patio into a sun room.

"We were thinking of finding a place farther out where we'd have some more privacy," he said. "But the more I thought about it, I like where I am. It's a nice street, all the neighbors know me."