Cozy Curb Appeal 4 Ways - Checking In With Chelsea

4 Ways to Create Cozy Curb Appeal

There’s not just one way to create curb appeal for your home! Here are 4 ways we’ve recently updated the curb appeal of 3 different houses featured on episodes of Today’s Homeowner.

Tear Down What Doesn’t Work

Sometimes you don’t need to add anything to update your home’s curb appeal. You just need to get rid of what’s not working for you anymore. This can be big or small! We worked on one house that had a sad and ugly fiberglass carport attached to the brick.

The worst part was that it leaked, so it really wasn’t offering that much protection. It was the first thing to go!

Tearing out old bushes, trimming overgrown ones, and cleaning out underbrush in your flower beds can make a big difference too!

Fresh mulch can make it look so polished!

We did some similar clean out and transplanting at this Chicago-area house!

Paint What You Don’t Like

Again, this can be big or small! The shutters on this house were in great shape, but the color didn’t suit the homeowners anymore.

So, we painted them in place with a dark brown exterior paint! (Espresso Beans from Behr)

A much larger undertaking is to paint the entire exterior of a house. In the case of Greg and Morgan’s house, the red bricks weren’t anything special and they wanted something a little more modern.

So we used an airless paint sprayer* to apply a masonry paint guaranteed for 20 years!

You can see we also painted their front door! A project that only takes a couple hours and gives you a good feeling when you pull into the driveway!

Make It Look Like Wood

Inside or outside your home, wood tones bring warmth and cozy vibes! With the right technique you don’t have to have something made of wood to make it look like wood!

The shutters on the painted brick house were green when we started. So we first painted them with a tan spray paint. Then we brushed on a gel stain to get brush strokes that resemble wood.

We did something very similar to the garage door and front door on this ranch home too.

Only instead of buying everything separately, we used a kit specifically made for this*! It came with a glove to use for the wood grain, but I found it easier to use a paint brush.

Front door after:

Make Accents with Wood

So far these exterior updates have all been changes to existing features. But if you don’t already have features to change, you might need to add some! The Chicago-area home had a cute base to start with.

We added simple window boxes with pressure-treated wood that we painted white.

Then above one window, we also added an arbor to fill up some of the brick expanse and to add a little cozy!

Before and Afters

Start with small changes to gain big appreciation for your home’s exterior! Click the titles below to watch the full transformations of each home featured on Today’s Homeowner!

Chicago Curb Appeal: