You may think there isn’t much you can do to improve the exterior of your home. However, there are plenty of innovative ways to give your home a thorough facelift. From taking away unappealing features to adding attractive ones, there are numerous positive steps you can take.
Here’s five big ways to improve the exterior of your home.
Make your driveway desirable
Driveways are often guilty of letting your home’s exterior down. Especially if there’s cracked concrete or paving, rutted gravel, or lots of weeds and moss. It looks unloved and isn’t particularly practical. Resurfacing and tidying up the driveway will give it a new lease of life.
If you’re installing a driveway from scratch, having block paving installed is a good idea. It’s more attractive than asphalt. And it makes it easier to fit a rainwater drainage system or soakaway, which helps avoid flood damage and water seeping into your home. You can border the edges in contrasting paving stones and create a decorative pattern with block paving too.
Remove dated features
It’s not all about adding more features to your home though. The exterior can be improved just as much by taking undesirable features away. Many houses are still suffering from the terrible trends of previous decades. These date a home’s exterior and make it look cheap. Some of these old-fashioned features create a clash with a home’s period character or detract from its good points.
What sort of exterior features does this include? Well, it can be anything from 1960s moulded concrete blocks in the garden to 1980s stone cladding on the walls. But crazy paving, ugly uPVC porches, pebbledash and rusty old television aerials are some other common offenders.
Use modern cladding techniques
Cladding or recladding your home can bring the exterior into the modern age. This is useful for homes built between the 1950s and 1990s that are now looking dated. Thankfully techniques have moved on from the days of fake stone cladding and pebbledash. Now there’s a whole range of styles you can achieve with a variety of materials.
Silicone and concrete render, timber boarding and brick slips are just the start. Powder-coated or patinated metals, stone tiles and composite cladding boards are also providing extra design options for updating our homes. Chat to a specialist and see what could work for your home.
With a new look that doesn’t require plastering and painting, you can give your home the perfect facelift. Not only that but you could also be making it more energy efficient as well as improving its aesthetic appeal.
Change your windows
Homes with single-glazed windows or uPVC windows with broken seals are not only inefficient but may also be letting your exterior down. But old windows aren’t the only reason to look at changing your glazing.
Windows are another one of those features that tend to date easily. Especially if they were installed to follow a trend rather than suit the property’s age and character. Do you have a 1980s home with leaded uPVC windows? Or a Victorian house with modern style windows? Then changing them could massively improve the exterior.
Soften hard edges with planting
Many urban and new-build homes are short on outside space, with off-street parking taking priority over lawns and rightly so. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at greening your exterior. The hardscaping of your home can make it look uninviting and grey. So, softening the outside with clever planting is an easy win.
How do you do this when space is tight? Hanging baskets and doorstep planters are a good start. You could fix trellis to walls and train climbing evergreens along it too, and modular, vertical gardening systems can increase wall and fence planting further. Plus, window boxes full of summer flowers or year-round heathers work well too. Bright plant pots that hook over fences and downpipes are another good option.
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