7 DIY Springtime Upgrades for Maximum Curb appeal

Spring is here and if you are like me, you start to notice more of what is going on outside. The air seems clearer and the colors are more crisp. We listed our house last week for sale and in addition to getting the inside of the home ready for showing, it's important to think about how the outside of your home looks too. First impressions count, right? But if landscaping isn't in your plans (or budget), fear not because there are quite a few super easy things you can do to the outside of your home to make it look more spring time ready!

1. Wash your windows (inside and out). You'll be amazed at how big of a difference it makes!
2. Pressure wash your driveway and sidewalk. Fall and winter grime builds up and darkens your concrete. A freshly washed driveway looks awesome.

3. Spruce up those flower beds. Lay down a coat of new beauty bark and add some pretty annuals or perennials. If you have a small space, just a few bags of bark from your local home improvement store will do the trick, but also buying bark in bulk is way less expensive if you have the ability to haul a yard or two.

4. Wash your house. This is a little more tricky, but we use a ladder and a car washing wand and it quickly scrubs off the dirt on the house. Sometimes the simple task of washing a house that hasn't been painted in the last decade it will brighten up the color.

More work, but high pay off:
1. Paint your front door. I recently painted our front door to change it from a tired purple to a hot flashy firehouse red. Va-voom!

2. Paint your house! We recently did this ourselves after getting really high estimates from our local painting businesses. For our two story home we used about 10 gallons of base coat and 2 gallons of trim. This can be as simple (and honestly tedious) as rolling it on by hand, but we were very fortunate that our neighbor has a excellent sprayer that we could borrow and got it done in no time. Some home improvement stories also rent these as well. The cost of DIY is very low, but it also does require a few days of hard work and the right tools that normally aren't on hand.

3. If painting the whole house isn't something you are totally up for, a real estate trick that works almost just as well is simply painting the trim. A fresh coat of paint on your house's trim gives the house an updated look without the commitment of a full paint job. This house was our first renovation and it was a really sun bleached yellow with white trim. We kept the body color the same and gave it a high contrasting blue trim. Looked better than new!

These tips are great whether you are selling your house or just want to give it that spring time re-fresh.

How do you give your front yard a 

quick, springtime make over?