Tips to Boost Your Home’s Curb Appeal

Your home’s curb appeal plays a major factor in its overall value. When you are trying to sell your home, you can never underestimate the value that curb appeal has. Not only will it affect the bottom line of what your home sells for, but it decreases the amount of time it is on the market. Here’s some simple tips to boost your curb appeal…

Biggest Boost: Front Door

The number one thing to state about curb appeal is that the front door is the absolute most important thing. People are drawn to the front door when they look at a home. It’s simply natural for our eyes to navigate towards the entrance. This is good, because the front door is also one of the simplest things to change. Purchasing a new front door, or even adding a new coat of paint, is a lot cheaper than completely overhauling your home’s exterior.

Cost Effective Curb Appeal

Boosting your curb appeal doesn’t have to be expensive. There are a wide variety of options that can be done for almost no money, or even just a small investment that isn’t much more expensive than lunch for the whole family:

• Paint Trim: The trim around your front door and windows is a powerful accent tool that controls the entire tone of what your home looks like. For this reason, painting that trim to be a specific color that fits your home’s aesthetic is a powerful tool to have control over your curb appeal. Using bright and flashy colors makes your house feel more like a fun-home, while you can use a nice wood stain to make your house feel more rustic.
• Redo the Garage Door: A garage door can either be a beautiful feature on your home, or an eyesore. Even if you don’t need a complete overhaul, there are a lot of cost-effective ways you can improve the look.
• Decorate Mailbox: Your mailbox is definitely something you don’t want to forget about, when it comes to curb appeal, as it is literally out by the curb of your home. If you have a shabby mailbox, then it reflects across your entire front yard and the whole of your home’s exterior. Getting a flashy new mailbox, or simply painting the one that you have, goes a long way towards making your house feel like a home that people can envision themselves in.
• DIY Address Numbers: The way that you mark your address can actually have quite an impact on your curb appeal. If people are driving around a neighborhood and looking for your specific address, then the numbers will be one of the first things that they notice about it. For this reason, you can add to your home’s curb appeal for almost nothing by getting some metal numbers from the hardware store and making your own address fixture. Get creative and add some color, if you really want to go all out!
• Add Flowers: If you want to add an aesthetic appeal to your home that gives it some pop, rather than just have it be like any other boring house on the block, then using flowers is a great option. Flowers add a natural boost of color that give your house personality, and also make it easily customizable. Add flowers by using planter boxes to attach to the side of your house, or by making traditional flower beds in your yard and around walkways. Young flowers are highly affordable when you go to a local greenhouse.
• Change Light Fixtures: Lighting is always an undervalued component of both curb appeal and home value. This is just as true for the exterior of your home as it is for the interior of your home. Exterior light fixtures can make your home more of a sleek and modern style, or can make it feel more rustic and classic. Lighting fixtures can be obtained for between $20-$30, but add a whole new layer to your home’s exterior look.
• Plant a Tree: Trees are a powerful component of curb appeal, because they don’t just raise value of your home, but actually improve property values around the entire neighborhood, according to several studies of cumulative home value in geographic areas. Even planting a small tree right now will offer a beautiful component to your landscaping, and it will become bigger and more valuable as the years go by.