Ready to sell your home or just ready to upgrade? Starting with the first things people see when they drive by your home or walk up to your house you’ll find there are plenty of ways to instantly increase the curb appeal of your home, and the good news is: none of these home improvement projects will take very long at all!

1. Add Outdoor Art

Think of sculptural and colorful ways to increase your home’s curb appeal. Think about the elements: add a water feature, a fire feature (maybe pathway lanterns, or a fire pit), stone statues, or even tile.

2. Add Arbors & Garden Gates

Arbors and garden gates are an elegant way to section off your outdoor space, essentially creating vignettes as you would with your interior spaces. This can also be done at a variety of price points. There are plenty of inexpensive, prefabricated options on the market, but for a price, this is also a great way to get creative and customize your outdoor space.

3. Replace Old Door & Window Hardware

If they’re dated or just plain dirty from weather and typical wear and tear, replacing your door and window hardware can be an easy and inexpensive place to start with increasing the curb appeal of your home.

4. New House Numbers

Installing new house numbers with a stylized aesthetic is another easy and inexpensive way to update your home. Particularly if your home address is difficult to spot, this is also one of the more useful ways you can increase the curb appeal of your home. For added flair, consider backlit house numbers or an uplight that illuminates at night.

5. Planters and Lanterns for Symmetry

Vary up the greenery with some potted as well as planted flowers and plants. Potted plants can be great to accent either side of the front door. Additionally, lanterns are a great front porch accessory that can double as an additional light source. Adding planters and lanterns on either side of your front door can help create that comforting symmetry that is really attractive to guests and potential homebuyers.

6. Color Splash

There are a couple of great ways to introduce color in a decorative and functional way with your home including a home’s trim, colorful mailbox, flowers, or a front door. Adding a bright front door is one of our favorite and easiest ways to instantly improve the curb appeal of a home. It’s also a great way to take a bit of a design risk because it’s easy to fix!

7. Path and Uplights

Properly lighting the exterior of your home is both inviting and a good security measure. Pathlights are a great, decorative way to lead guests in the right direction towards your front door from the street, and uplights can function similarly to art lights, highlighting accents, drawing the eye upward towards trees and windows and other details.

8. Keep That Lawn Manicured

Although the drought is officially over, with Californian water in short supply, we’ve all been trying to continually reduce our usage. But it’s a double-edged sword because keeping a well maintained lawn is good for more than just the aesthetic curb appeal of your home: It also helps reduce erosion and runoff and purifies the environment. Contrary to popular belief, your lawn may can actually go awhile without water and may not need as much as you think it does, if properly trimmed. Opt for a system that catched runoff and utilizes recycled water to maintain your lawn and be sure its properly fertilized.

9. Match the Landscape Architecture to the Home’s Style

You might love your succulents and segos, but if you have a more traditional home, op’t for a more tame landscape that compliments the style of your home. Of course, if you’re a rule-breaker like us, you read that and instantly want to rebel against it. As with all rules, design rules are also meant to be broken; what’s important is that they’re broken in a deliberate fashion.

10. Add Seating

Too often in Southern California, we don’t fully utilize all of the outdoor space in front of our homes. Take a page out of the Southerner’s handbook and put a rocking chair or keep in typical So-Cal cool  with an eclectic space to lounge on the front porch or deck complete with seating and garden stools. Few things are more welcoming than a cozy chair.

11. Upgrade Gutters & Downspouts

This is an area of the home you probably haven’t thought about in a while, but left unmaintained, it’s a surefire way to decrease your property value with shown signs of neglect. From snap-fit vinyl, to copper, there are a multiple ways to upgrade gutters and downspouts at various price points.

12. Tile Your Doorstep, or Your Door, Walkways, and Patios

We’re huge proponents of the architectural style that tile adds to a home. In many of our indoor-outdoor focused Southern California projects, we love a tile that starts outside and continues inside the home. We’re also always looking for new, innovative ways to utilize tile: as a walkway trim, or to frame a doorway.

13. Dress Up Your Driveway and Garage Door

Driveways take quite a beating. They’re often one of the first things we’d suggest sprucing up whether with new concrete or planters framing the outside. Adding a new garage door can be a pricey upgrade, but is always well worth the investment, especially with newer construction that has the garage and driveway prominently on display at the front of the home, as many SoCal homes do.

14. Add a Stone Veneer (With Caution)

You’ll want to work with an experienced architect or contractor to avoid that stone stick-on look of early aughts McMansions, but adding some stone to your home’s exterior is a great way to add style and texture.

Repaint, Repaint, Repaint

Perhaps the single BEST way to increase your home’s curb appeal is with a fresh coat or paint, and trim. Need we say more?