Though many say don’t judge a book by its cover, the reality is that outward appearance often says a lot about inward appearance. In the case of a home, a yard that is well taken care of and exterior house is a good sign that the house itself is well-maintained and high quality as well. Whether you’re looking to sell a house or simply want to be welcomed by a beautiful home when you get off work every day, these outdoor projects will give your home a makeover!
Add Decorative Concrete
One of the up-and-coming new materials to remodel with, decorative concrete is much cheaper than its wood, brick, granite, and slate counterparts while being able to emulate their appearance. Decorative concrete is also environmentally safe, waterproof, and easy to repair. For your outdoor makeover, consider transforming a plain driveway into something stylish, or laying a patio without as much need for upkeep as other materials require while also having the appearance of decorative tiles. The options are practically limitless, and you can save the majority of your budget for other projects!
Repaint Window Trim and Doors
Over time, weather and sunlight turn bright, clean window trims into dull additions that neither accent nor accentuate the rest of the house any longer. Detail on a house is like icing on a cake, so revamping your window trim draws the eye to the shape and color of the rest of the house, highlighting its strengths instead of contributing to its dullness. Similarly, doors are often forgotten and rarely repainted, leaving them a plain afterthought of the rest of the house’s design when well-designed doors can actually be a source of intrigue and style. Really, with just a fresh coat of paint you can do a lot to make the rest of your house seem new and updated.
Enrich Your Soil
A more obscure but surprisingly effective way of improving your home’s appearance is to enrich your soil and, specifically, the dirt where you plan to garden or have plants already growing. Plants truly can give vitality and beauty to the outdoor look of a home, but only if they’re able to thrive themselves. To best improve your soil, use things such as compost, manure, or mulch to add nutrients and organic matter that will also help with water retention. You can find many different colors of mulch to match your landscape and outdoor color scheme, so even as you enrich soil, you can add style!
Plant Flowers in Window Boxes
Speaking of plants, you can really add beauty and nature to the very structure of your home by installing boxes for a small little garden just outside your windows. The kind of box can vary and be painted whatever color works with your house design, but make sure there are holes in the boxes for drainage, and to put potting soil not garden loam in them to ensure roots can still spread. This kind of look can also be customized according to your home design by what plants you choose, so consider the best flowers for window boxes as well as their color, height, and appearance. You can even get unique and pick plants outside of the usual petunias and geraniums, and train vines to climb up window frames or the coleus plant to add color in a more unusual way.
Lay a Garden Path
Creating a beautiful pathway through your outdoor living area is a great way to give your exterior house interest and even mystery. The steps to make a path are quite simple—simply lay out the path with string, dig out the soil to a depth according to the thickness of the stone you’re using (plus two inches), and smooth out the ground. Add a layer of fabric, sand, and then lay out the stones with gravel or sand filled in the gaps! All that’s left is to spray the walkway and refill the gaps until the sand is settled, finishing this simple but beautiful project.
Build a Patio
Patios add so much value to a home and its versatility for outdoor living, and besides that give the exterior of a house a much more completed look whether it is installed in the front or the back. This kind of area also provides more opportunities to create luxury and beauty around your house, with furniture and terraces and other decorative items to place on it. Not to mention, you can also use that extended space to plant more garden areas and interesting plants around. Though some say you can build a patio in a weekend, this kind of project is generally a bigger one and takes more planning than adding mulch to a garden, not to mention equipment!
Clean Vinyl Siding
If you have vinyl siding, you probably have noticed how quickly it can grow dirty, especially in times of extreme weather—or maybe you don’t, not until it is covered in grime and mold! Regardless, taking the time to better the appearance of your home can be as simple as cleaning off these parts of your exterior, whether it is washing the vinyl siding by hand or getting a hold of a power washer to spray off the hard-to-reach areas. Doing this at least once a year if you have vinyl siding, however, is worth the small effort that it takes to maintain a clean, new-looking house, and it won’t even require a new installation of anything!
A house is the sum of its component parts, and its exterior can tell you a lot about its maintenance and even the people who live inside. Even if you clean, refurbish, and update every feature of the inside of your home, it will not do nearly as much good if the outside does not draw visitors or potential buyers in as well. Making the outside of your home beautiful and welcoming doesn’t take as much effort as you think, however, so take a look from the outside and see which of these projects might really give your exterior a makeover!
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