Finding ways to improve your home curb appeal isn’t just about neighborhood notoriety.

An attractive facade adds serious value to your property. Curb appeal isn’t just for real estate agents, either — the same improvements that affect a home’s appraisal often give you more efficient buildings and lower utility bills if installed correctly. 

Let’s take a look at some of the most effective means of increasing your home’s value and boosting your curb appeal.

Install New Siding

Much of what is suggested by typical home improvement blogs are, simply put, bandaid recommendations. To really improve your home curb appeal, you need to start with its basic components. Perhaps the most obvious item is your siding.

A home’s siding is a make-or-break component of its attractiveness. Installing new siding can be the right move if your current home is suffering from fading, cracking, buckling, or warping.

Other common signs that your siding is in need of replacement include frequent painting and rising heating/cooling bills. Properly installed siding shouldn’t need another coat of paint more than once a decade. If you’re seeing faded colors or chipping paint, it’s likely because the siding wasn’t correctly installed in the first place.

The utility costs are often trickier to spot, so review your bills paid over the past couple years to identify any upward trends. There are a lot of factors that can contribute to rising heating/cooling bills, but if you’re struggling to find the culprit, you may need to look at your walls themselves. Siding that is installed with cheaper materials or low-grade insulation will wear down faster, resulting in poor temperature retention and indoor comfort control.

Homeowners should also frequently check their exterior siding for signs of moisture damage or mold. While the other items we’ve listed are problems which slowly arise over time, moisture damage and mold can arrive and do their damage rather quickly. Look for discolorations or worn down patches of siding near your seams and corners.  If you see bubbles underneath your siding, it likely means that water has been trapped, and your siding is in need of replacement.

Damaged or depleted siding is a big knock on a home’s attractiveness, so get in the habit of routinely checking out how the outside of your home is doing.

Maintain Or Replace Your Trim

It may sound funny, but your home’s exterior trim is kind of like your eyebrows. It’s not the first thing people notice when they look at you unless they’re really, really bad or really, really good. Just like eyebrows, great trim can elevate an attractive home to a gorgeous one.

First, you should check to see if your current trim needs to be replaced.

Next, consider the style, both of your own home and the homes surrounding you. Just like any style choice, your home’s trim should match the rest of your house. You shouldn’t be using the same style choices for a Victorian-style home as you would for a modern.

Making sure the trim matches your own home is the most important consistency step, but after that, consider how your home’s style will mesh with the other homes in the neighborhood. This is less important for long-term homeowners, but for those looking to sell somewhere down the line, the home’s appraisal can be impacted by how well it matches its peers.

The key is a balance. First and foremost, choose a style, brand, and aesthetic that matches what you want out of your home. After that, the best guidelines to increase your home curb appeal is to find a middle ground between cookie-cutter home design and being so different from those around you that you lower your property value.  

Make Your Roof Help Your Curb Appeal

Just because it’s above everyone’s head doesn’t mean they can’t see it.

Your roof is a great place to improve your home curb appeal, and more importantly, its overall value. The best roofs act as both a functional insulator and a gorgeous design element.

Most roofs go through two periods of existence. The first is right after installation. This where the shingles are shiny, the interior is well-protected, and the homeowner is most happy. The second period is after the homeowner gets used to the roof. Once the roof becomes the standard instead of the new toy, homeowners tend to stop inspecting it and checking it for problems.

It’s during this period that smaller issues start to arise in your roof. Cracks, fading, splits in the shingling, and missing granule are all some of the symptoms that a roof has gone unchecked for quite a while. Not only does this depreciate your home’s value, it makes your home less secure from the elements and your interior energy consumption less efficient. Just like your siding, an outdated roof impacts more than a home’s attractiveness.

If you’re comfortable and capable of getting on your roof and inspecting it yourself, take a close look at the arrangement of the shingles to spot any worn down areas or loose fitting that can’t be spotted from street-level. If you aren’t comfortable getting up on your roof, it’s always a safer bet to contact a roofing contractor to provide an inspection.

Metal roofs are another alternative worth considering for homeowners on the hunt for roofing improvements. Less susceptible to visible deterioration and generally longer-lasting than shingled roofs, metal roofs are a trend in homeownership that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

Gardens Boost Curb Appeal

People like plants. Plain and simple.

Perhaps the most immediate solution to improve your home curb appeal is investing in gardening. Whether you plant your own vegetables or simply place potted flowers in your front yard, it’s undeniable that homes with lush greenery are attractive and more valuable.

As with everything we’ve mentioned, coordination is key. You can always hire an exterior designer to tastefully implement gardens and greenery, but if you want to do it yourself, keep it simple. If you have a modern home, stick to ferns, bushes, region-specific flowers, and vines if you’re feeling adventurous.

The key is to have a reasonable amount of greens — too little and it has no effect, too much and no one can see your home.

Improve Your Home’s Curb Appeal With Longview

We’re experts in home roofing, siding, trim and repair who have operated throughout New Jersey for over 30 years. Contact us today to discuss how we can boost your home’s exterior and make you a happier homeowner.