Is you home’s exterior looking a little tired right now? Does it need to be spiffed up? We have seven easy ways to freshen your home’s exterior now. They can all be done at once, or you can do just one of these things and give your front door area a brighter and cleaner look.
Replant Some Annuals
If you planted flowering annuals in the spring, they could be looking scraggly about now. The heat can do that to flowers (and to us.) The best way to remedy this situation is to pull out the old annuals and plant some new ones. Flowering annuals are on sale right now at most garden centers, so it’s a good time to buy some. Or you can give your existing flowers a good haircut, a good watering, and some plant food. This trick won’t give you instant results, but your annuals will revive and bloom again in a few weeks.
Paint Your Front Door
It’s only paint…..right? The easiest and quickest fix you can do to your home’s exterior is to paint the front door. It takes no more than a quart of paint and an hour or two. The nice thing is that you can go a little wild, and if you don’t like it, then you can paint it another color.
Change or Paint the Hardware
Here’s another easy fix because if you don’t want to go to the work and expense of changing your hardware, just spray paint it to freshen it up. When we replaced the hardware on our front door last year, I didn’t want to change the door knocker because I liked it a lot. So, we just spray painted it the mat black so it would have the same finish as our new Baldwin hardware.
Buy New Lights
This is another easy fix. Just be sure that you buy lights that are big enough for your exterior. See the formula in this post. I hate to see lights that are too small on a house. It makes them look cheap. Here’s the formula that you should follow: Your lights should be 1/4 to 1/3 the length of your front door. For instance, if you front door is seven feet tall (that’s the standard height), then your lights should be 21 to 28 inches high.
Power Wash
We bought this power washer recently, and it was/is a game changer. The sprayer we bought is this one. It is under $100 and has tons of very good reviews. It can deep clean many things like sidewalks, driveways, brick, fabric, patio umbrellas, and fountains. (See how I used it to clean our courtyard fountain in this post.) I even read how one blogger used a power washer to clean her living room rug, and it wasn’t even an indoor/outdoor rug.
Buy a New Exterior Umbrella
Do you have an umbrella over your outdoor dining table that is looking tired? Lucky you because they are on sale right now. I learned the hard way that quality definitely counts here. After replacing umbrellas yearly for a few years, I finally saw the light and invested in a good patio umbrella. It still looks as good as it did its first year, and we have had it for three years. I did power wash it to get rid of trapped in dust, and that’s all it needed to look as if it just came out of the box.
Ditto for Pillows
Your outdoor pillows might be looking dingy and faded about now. So, you have a few choices on what to do. First, if they are indoor/outdoor pillows, try power washing them. Jordan did that to her pillows in the spring and is getting another year of use out of them. Or you can buy new ones because they are on sale right now, too. And your last choice is to make some new ones following these steps. Yvonne at Stone Gable blog even used plastic table cloths to make covers fo rher outdoor pillows. Now, that’s being creative!!! See how she did it here.
We hope you can put some of these tips to use at your home. Have a wonderful day, and thank you for spending time with us.
Take care.
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