Thursday, March 24, 2016

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?

35 comments:

  1. I honestly don't see a big difference with the pressure washed sidewalk.

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  2. Omgosh I looove bright doors!! So super cute! And you are right!! Such a great curb appeal pop!! I cannot wait to be a homeowner one day!! Lots of work but totally worth it!!

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  3. These are all great tips and your house looks amazing after! :) My husband washes the outside of the house frequently and it makes a huge difference in the appearance.

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  4. I wish we had a pressure washer!

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  5. I can't believe how drastic the improvements are!~

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  6. WOW these are some EXCELLENT TIPS!!!, I am Glad that you had decided to make a story share about how to DIY when it comes to Sprucing Up your own home , especially for folks like our family with a barely there budget..So a Huge Thank-You for this :-)

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  7. I got my house painted last year and my foundation repaired. What a huge difference just that made. More to do this year however.

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  8. Everything you did really improved the look of your home. Good luck with the sale.

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  9. Yes i love it. I am one who likes to look for diy home projects. I love changing things up. We did diy projects on our house before selling amd renting

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  10. Oh I just love home repairs! pressure washing your driveway really does make a lot of difference and it's quite easy to do!

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  11. Great tips! It's getting warm need to bring in some curb appeal!

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  12. Thanks for the tips. Your house looks great, I think I might paint my white front door with color this year too!

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  13. I replaced the color of the brown mulch with red and it made a huge difference!! I wish we owned our house because I would paint the front door a bright color. Love this review.

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  14. Wow this is amazing! Love the paint job!

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  15. I can't wait to try these =]] I am about to start spring cleaning the inside of my house and once I'm done, I'm gonna use this post to spring clean the outside =]]

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  16. I read these articles and get eager to do stuff to our house, but no time or money!

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  17. Excellent tips for spring time spruce ups!!

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  18. Cleaning and planting! Hope to fix up our front porch someday too. :)

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  19. These are some great suggestions. We have just started doing some spring clean up around our house. These are some great suggestions. Thank you so much for sharing

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  20. Definitely need to do this for my house...

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  21. I love the bright door, I'd do this if I owned.

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  22. I'm in live with planters for curb appeal, and since all of the houses in our neighbourhood have rather obscure numbers, I'd like to do something to make ours pop. Hello, Pinterest-worthy!

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  23. Love all these suggestions, I will definitely be doing my windows and my little flower bed. If I weren't in a rental, I would SO paint my front door !!!

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  24. I love Spring and Springtime cleaning, I think its important to find the updates because often they are small but they can make a huge impact on your home.

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  25. We really enjoy doing upgrades to the house outside!

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  26. We removed old, dead shrubs & added bright new address numbers at our house this year - a quick fix, but definitely effective!

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  27. Thank you for this! We bought a home for the first time last fall. I didn't realize that pressure-washing the driveway made such a big difference! I hadn't thought of washing the house either.

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  28. These are great ideas for routine spring cleaning. We seem to have less of a need to purchase more perennials and more of a need to thin them out each spring, though!

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  29. These are great tips! We are going to be putting our house on the market soon, so we need to implement several of these ideas

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  30. These are great tips to give your home a nicer look.

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