Curb appeal for real estate is like sex appeal for dating: a terrific first impression can make all the difference. For Southeast Michigan homeowners, maximizing the curb appeal of their house through a creative and eye-catching exterior renovation is a great way to capture the attention of discerning buyers, and increase the value of your property. Enhanced curb appeal also makes staying in your home a greater joy by significantly improving your family’s quality of life.
Options abound for increasing curb appeal, ranging from relatively simple and quick projects like adding a flower bed, fresh landscaping, or a new coat of exterior paint, to a whole new roof, porch, outdoor living space, or full-fledged home addition. The best choice for an exterior renovation depends on your budget, design decisions, and the existing home’s design, layout, and architecture. Here are a few proven suggestions to help best enhance your home’s curb appeal:
Focusing on the Facade
The first thing a prospective buyer, gawking neighbor, or appreciative family member sees of your Bloomfield home is your front lawn, entryway and porch, windows and architectural details, outdoor areas, and roof topping your entire home. Options abound for remodeling any of these exterior features, with the caveat of always ensuring your design and build choices coordinate perfectly with those of your existing home. Partner with a professional firm from the start!
Create a Welcoming Entryway with a New Front Porch
Many Beverly Hills homes have porches but can use a creative, seamlessly integrated design makeover to instantly boost their curb appeal. Remaining architecturally faithful to the home’s original character is paramount, ensured by partnering with a design-build firm that begins where prior remodelers left off. Perfectly matched structural elements and exquisite design details, such as copper, standing seam finishes, cedar shake shingles, and panel-style front doors are extraordinary.
Resurfaced porch flooring, new front and side steps, stone veneer, and a gabled roof are a few creative choices for a porch, pergola, or awning. Sconce, pendant and recessed lighting, decorative and other non-structure elements transform your entire home’s curb appeal, especially at night. Don’t forget less sexy but still vital exterior upgrades, including insulation and sheathing to keep the heat in and the cold out during frigid Michigan winters, opposite during scorching Midwestern summers.
Revamp the Front Window Design and Layout
If an entryway and porch are the gateway to your home, your front windows embody its essential character. Most windows are as old as the homes they were built into, making replacement with a refreshed design and better materials, such as UV-protected glass, essential for a more modern appearance and higher efficiency. Windows come in all geometric shapes, from circles to rectangles. Stay true to your home’s legacy design and architectural style by ensuring a proper match.
Regardless of the style, partner with a trusted designer every step of the way. For example, a mid-century modern Birmingham home will demand coordination of all elements of your new facade, including proper staining of the original limestone, painting the brick, and replacing double-hung windows with more contemporary but still matching symmetrical casement windows with black trim detailing for the rear and side windows. The design is everything.
Update or Add Architectural Details
Exterior remodeling extras go a long way, including small architectural design details such as shutters, trim, decorative moldings, and structural elements such as railing and columns. Your materials and design decisions should seamlessly blend with and enhance the overall design, including your new entryway and porch style, windows, and other enhancements. A good rule of thumb is for these details to avoid overwhelming the other, more significant elements.
Specific decorative exterior molding and trim include dentil, gingerbread, and brackets, often with a gable pediment. Contemporary detailing goes beyond traditional wood and uses synthetic, weather-resistant materials. For a classic, formal-style look, your designer might suggest exterior crown molding and a pediment over a front door flanked by columns or pilasters. The only limit is your creativity – and the style of the rest of your home.
Design an Outdoor Living Space
Shifting attention from your home’s structure to the surrounding property, outdoor living spaces such as patios, decks, and pergolas can boost curb appeal through form and function. They add alluring good looks to your Royal Oak home and provide significant square footage for various purposes ranging from outdoor kitchens, fire pits, and BBQs to seating and socializing spaces for entertaining guests and groups.
Consult with your family about the best one to design! Depending on the function, outdoor living spaces might need infrastructure enhancements, including plumbing, gas, and electrical lines. Lighting and landscaping elements such as fixtures and torches, plants, flower beds, and other design tweaks can completely transform your otherwise lackluster and under-utilized lawn into a terrific-looking and highly appealing outdoor extension of your family’s Birmingham home.
Redesign and Enhance Your Roof
At the figurative and literal top of any exterior remodeling list is a roof redesign, possibly the most prominent feature of every Pleasant Ridge home, and most effective for curb appeal. Most redesigns focus on creating a more welcoming and interesting roof line, which consists of the fascias, soffits, bargeboards, and guttering that separate the edge of the roof from the structure of your home and perform various functions, such as draining water and insulating.
Since the roof line significantly characterizes the overall architectural style of your home, it must also blend seamlessly with your home’s legacy style. Popular choices include saltbox, sloped, gable, A-line, hip, mansard, and gambrel designs. An exterior remodel can and often should include upgrading your roof materials, too, with options including asphalt shingles, clay tiles, metal slats, slate, cedar, and other types of shingles. Your design professional can help.
Adding an Addition
Bigger is sometimes better, especially when it comes to curb appeal. Enhancing your home’s facade with gorgeous exterior renovations will make an immediate impression while adding a room addition also significantly boosts overall square footage and utility. From single- and two-story to multiple additions, entirely new living spaces on top or flush with your existing home’s structure can completely transform your family’s home and everyday quality of life.
Go Big for a Grand Effect
Designing and building a second-story addition can double your living space, with the curb appeal and value of an older home that becomes new and significantly improved. Given the chance to redesign the essential layout of your entire home, partner creatively and closely with your trusted design-build contractor to bring to life your dream home, and do so with the greatest benefit and efficiency possible. It all starts with your imagination.
In terms of design considerations, ensure that all the new construction looks like a natural extension of your home’s current style. Choose tasteful exterior and roofing materials that improve on and still blend with legacy work, such as hand-glazed masonry stucco with a copper shingled roof for a contemporary look and feel. For interiors, use the extra space to create that spacious kitchen or master bedroom suite you’ve always wanted.
Expand Your Existing Footprint
Many Michigan metro area homeowners not only build up but out with room additions that take advantage of available space on their property. Particularly ideal for in-law suites and other first-floor expansions with their entrances, these additions can scale from a single room to an entirely new wing of your home and contain anything from a new spacious gaming and entertainment area to extra bedrooms, lavish bathrooms, a kitchen, and laundry rooms.
For maximum curb appeal, consider building alongside your home rather than behind it, which is dependent on your available property space. Stunning additions include window-lined greenhouses and sunrooms loaded with colorful plants and luxurious seating areas, a semi-enclosed dining and entertainment area with weather-resistant tables and chairs, or how about a bluestone side patio with a built-in custom fire pit surrounded by a solid masonry wall with a flamed coping?
Customize to Suit Your Personal Needs
Room additions offer a flexible blend of exterior and interior design ideas and applications, which you and your design-build firm can bring to life with a choice of dormers, specialty windows, and various architectural details. Partner up to figure out how to evolve your current layout and structure to add eye-catching features while making the most of every available square foot. To make it all happen, don’t hesitate to tear things down to build them back up even better.
Many Michigan homes are historic in style and layout, and a well-designed and quality-built addition can expand that traditional charm and character. Precisely matched brick and stonework, grand columns and brass rails, box windows, and copper gutters are only a few ways an expert designer can recommend the most appropriate and beautiful materials and craftsmanship. Creative genius plus attention to detail get the quality job done!
Design-Build to Perfection
MainStreet Design Build is a full-service, design-build remodeling firm headquartered in Birmingham, MI. As the local leader, MainStreet is committed to delivering a luxurious end-to-end remodeling experience marked by personal care, accountability, timeless design, and exacting attention to detail. Since 1991, our team has made the renovation process comfortable, enjoyable, and safe, ensuring your home transformation exceeds your expectations at every turn.
Having produced elegant results that have enhanced the curb appeal of Birmingham residents, MainStreet Design Build is favored by discerning homeowners throughout Southeast Oakland County who value a high level of comfort and trust in knowing that their remodeling project will be done RIGHT. Browse our gallery of award-winning exterior renovations and schedule a virtual design consultation. Let’s partner today to create curb appeal that sets your home apart!
