Exterior Design: 10 Transformative Ideas for Your Home

a wooden door in a house

Paint Your Door a Bright Color

Most people are hesitant to paint the outside of their house a bright color that stands out. However, painting your front door a bright color adds a fun pop to the exterior of your home and will draw in people’s attention. Red is a classic front door color, but you shouldn’t feel pigeon-toed by red. You can choose kelly green, teal, yellow, or purple. Choose a shade of your favorite color regardless of what color the rest of your house is painted.

Create an Entryway

If the entrance to your house is simply the front door, it probably doesn’t feel very welcoming or cozy. You can create an entranceway with an arch, pillars, landscape, large potted plants, or seasonal decorations—anything to signify that it isn’t just a door by the entrance to your loving home.

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Make a Nice Walkway

A stone walkway from the sidewalk or drive up to your front door will add to the creation of an entranceway, as well as enhance the overall look of your exterior. You can create a walkway with old pieces of sandstone, extra landscape stones, slices of a tree trunk, or pre-formed cement stepping stones.

Repaint Your House

If you aren’t hesitant to paint your house a bold color, go for it. Instead of a muted blue-grey, try periwinkle, aqua, or sky blue. Instead of beige, consider rose, lavender, or yellow. As long as you don’t live in a housing association with limits to what you are allowed to do, choose the color you’ve always loved. It will make you happy and get people’s attention.

Put in a Stained Glass Window

There isn’t too much you can do with the actual windows of your home to make a dramatic transformative change, except for stained glass. Best known for its placement in churches, stained glass uses broken pieces of glass connected with melted lead to create beautiful patterns and images within the window.

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Tidy Up Your Landscape

There are so many things you can do with the landscape in front of your home to create transformative change; it depends on your starting point. You can add or remove flower beds, trees, and shrubbery. If you want to make a complete change, you can create the entranceway, walkway, and change the landscape all at once, making the front of your house look completely different.

Add Window Boxes

If adding stained-glass windows isn’t the transformative change you were looking for, you can add window boxes to each window on the front of your house. Then fill them with beautiful and full plants that will flower each year, or plant perennials each year to ensure you have boxes full of flowers for the spring and summer seasons.

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Refinish Your Exterior

Changing the finish on the exterior of your house will be hugely transformative, but also expensive. If your house is currently wood-clad, you can change it to vinyl siding. Maybe your house is vinyl siding, but you’ve always loved the look of homes with a natural stone exterior. You can have the siding removed, and a natural stone exterior put up.

Deck Out Your Outdoor Lighting

Lighting makes a huge difference regardless of whether it is interior to exterior. New lighting can be as simple as getting new light fixtures on the outside of your house. If you want to get dramatic with the lighting, you can do something like installing an old-fashion lamppost at the end of your new walkway or the top of your driveway near the entranceway.

Accessorize with Shutters

Similarly to the flower boxes, shutters can transform the look of your windows without actually changing your windows. They can also add a pop of color to the house.