Increase Your Curb Appeal With These Porch Tips

Ready to take your house from forgettable to “the one with the adorable front porch?” Buyers look at an average of 10 homes over a 10-week period before they make a purchase so it’s no easy task to stand out. But when you follow these staging tips to elevate a home’s porch curb appeal, your abode will be remembered as fondly your favorite lazy Sunday mornings spent sipping coffee on the steps.

Perform a porch facelift before you dress it up

Before you gussy up a grungy, mundane, or weather-worn porch, you’ll need to clean, repair, and update the space to a pristine condition.

First tackle the immediate porch surrounding areas: To prevent your house from sticking out like a sore thumb, it will go a long way to simply clean your home’s exterior and tidy up the landscaping around the porch for instant curb appeal points. Make sure the main attraction (your porch’s character and seating area) doesn’t get lost among overgrown branches and shrubbery.

But as you get to snipping, be sure you don’t go too far: “Greenery warms up an environment, so you don’t want to chop it all back a week before you list,” says Michael Winslow, a top-selling agent in Colorado Springs, Colorado who’s sold over 79% more properties than his peers.

“Landscaping takes a while to grow and flourish, so you just want to gently trim and prune your greenery by hand.”

With that done, it’s time to breathe new life into your cookie-cutter front door, poured-concrete steps, and standard-issue porch roof columns to attract buyers, starting with these tips:

tip: Play with paint to enhance your porch curb appeal

Paint is the first place to make standout choices. While you need to choose a neutral color for most of the exterior to make sure your paint job increases your home’s value, you can go a bit bolder in your color selection for the front door.

Crimson red, canary yellow, cobalt blue, spring grass green, even pitch black—the sky’s the limit when choosing a front door color, as long as you keep the vibrant hue confined to the front door.

Resurface your steps

If your home has those all-too-common concrete steps, you don’t need to take drastic destroy-and-replace measures to eliminate that eyesore.

Boring, ordinary porch steps are easily transformed into natural stone look-alikes by adding stone veneers over top of your existing concrete steps. Stone veneers add a unique architectural accent that can go rustic with a rounded river rock mosaic or more formal with brick-stacked slate or granite.

For concrete steps that are in rough shape, you can tackle two problems at once by hiring a concrete specialist to make repairs and resurface the stairs.

While making repairs, a pro can also drastically improve the look of your steps with stamped concrete that can give your stairs the look of everything from brickwork to weathered wood planks. Concrete can even be dyed so it has bricks or wood.

Cover your columns

Once you add a pop of color on the front door and rock star veneers on the steps, your ordinary, mass-purchased-by-the-builder columns will start to look out of place.

Luckily, boring roof support posts are easily transformed into impressive, ornate columns with column wraps. Craftsman or Grecian, fluted or tapered, column wraps are available to match any architectural style.

Replacement is the alternative to hiding your existing porch columns. It’s absolutely doable to DIY porch columns, but it’s by no means easy.

Temporary supports are needed so the roof doesn’t collapse while you’re replacing the existing columns. You’ll also have to make absolutely sure that the new posts are straight, capable of supporting the roof, and that the installation meets home inspection standards.

If that sounds too tricky or time-consuming, contact a professional. The gain will be well worth it! Even if you have questions about the tips we’ve provided on how to improve curb appeal, we’d love to chat!

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