Kerb Appeal Makeover

Before you ask, I assure you we are not putting our home on the market.

I think kerb appeal isn’t just for potential buyers of your property but also for yourself, and the people actually living there.

We all deserve a nice looking home, and it really does make the difference when you come back after a long day. Seeing your home from the street, in an ideal world, should give you a feeling of happiness and gratitude. Not make you groan every time you walk up to the front door.

The facade of the home can easily get neglected though, with budgets for renovations only stretching so far. Often jobs inside the house take (and rightly so) a much higher priority than the cosmetic exteriors.

Case in point with our house, the porch and the painted render has needed doing since before we moved in.

Lets take a look at the before photos shall we?

The porch was literally falling apart and needed a redesign and the paint colour on the render, made it look like the house itself had a 20 cigarettes a day habit. It look nicotine stained! I’m sure it must’ve been white previously, or perhaps the dreaded magnolia.

Either way it needed an overhaul and I’m not one to shy away from a bit of colour. I wrote about this very topic a year ago here; Colourful houses

We had a local firm come and redo the porch. it took me ages to decide what to go for as I didn’t want it looking uPVC overload. In an ideal world I’d have loved a half brick porch but at the end of the day its a porch and we’d rather go on holiday, or put that money elsewhere.

For the house painting we collaborated with Santex by Crown Paints. After the neglect our house has been through, we were particularly interested in the microseal technology that this paint offers. Dirt resistant and waterproof, this paint impressed our painters too, and it went on really quickly. What you see here is two coats of the Soft Heather, with Brilliant White for the lintels and any other accent areas.

It’s worth picking some samples up from your local DIY shop, we almost went with an olive green but this grey/violet won out in the end.

Here you can see the back of the house and a sneaky peek of the pergola we’ve had installed!

I think you’ll agree the house has much more kerb appeal now. What do you think of the colour?

Check out my top ten tips for surviving home renovations.