When you strive to improve your home, it might include remodeling, renovating, or simply updating bedding, drapes, and furniture covers. Home improvement doesn’t have to cost a lot, although some items cost more than others. This article covers 10 home investments that beautify your home, and add value to it.
Add Landscaping and Gardens
Plant trees, shrubs, garden beds of flowers, and edible plants of varying heights. The height differential adds visual interest to the yard and depth. Use various colors of plants to create either a rainbow of colors or to theme the landscape to match your home’s exterior. These types of landscaping add to your home’s curb appeal.
A tiny house with a small yard won’t require much more than a water hose to handle the hydration needs of its plants. A larger property requires an irrigation system to hydrate its plantings easily and efficiently. Although the word irrigation might make you think of a farm, many suburban homes feature sprinkler systems, the small homeowner version of a full irrigation system.
Perhaps gardening isn’t your thing, though. Choose a xeriscape instead. This type of landscaping uses drought-hearty native plants and stone to create a visual display on the grounds that requires almost no watering or weeding on the part of the homeowner. It still increases the home’s curb appeal.
Creating Curb Appeal with Hardscapes
Install hardscapes to improve your home and its curb appeal. Hardscapes add utility to your property and beauty. They encompass any wood, stone, or resin structure, including the driveway, walkway, retaining walls, and fence. Building these hardscapes requires masonry contractors, but the results make it worth the investment.
Athletic and recreational areas also consist of hardscapes. If you play tennis, pickleball, basketball, or any hard court sport, your home court counts as a hardscape. So do swimming pools and their surrounding cement easements.
What else falls into the category of hardscapes? Patios, pergolas, porticos, porches, decks, and gazebos. Any outdoor spaces for sitting or lounging qualify as a hardscape. Most require a mason to build or at least install the foundation.
Connecting Outdoor Spaces with a Deck
Let’s consider how decks can improve your home a bit more. Most deck types don’t require a masonry foundation. The exception, pergolas, stands in a category by itself. Gazebos offer you a choice of cement foundation beneath the flooring or using a piers and piling method for the foundation and flooring. These two items typically require both a mason and local deck contractors.
To unify your outdoor areas and hardscapes, consider connecting your decks with suspended walkways. Why keep the deck that extends from the rear of your home separate from the deck that edges your in-ground or above-ground swimming pool? Instead of forcing people to leave one hardscape and walk on the ground to reach another, connect them with a walkway of the same material. This creates continuity in your home’s hardscapes and can make work done at different periods seem as if it was all constructed at once.
Many deck construction contractors also offer design services. If the multitude of home improvement shows featuring outdoor kitchen designs, has you wanting to put one in at your home, a deck contractor can help with this. Work with your local contractor to create a design that lets you cook anything outside. That means a design that includes a stove, oven, grill, and electrical outlets for small appliances like crock pots and air fryers.
Keep Everyone Safer with a Hefty Fence
Installing residential fencing not only provides a way to improve your home, but it also improves your safety. That safety improvement extends to your family, friends who visit, pets, and neighbors. A fence keeps your children and pets inside your yard, which ensures they can’t run into the street, potentially getting hit by a vehicle. A fence also deters vandals, burglars, and other rangy characters that might target your home.
Home design offers a veritable cornucopia of options for fence design. The most common types of fence include:
- chain link
- wood
- brick
- stone
- resin
- metal.
While chain link fences cost the least, they offer little boost to curb appeal. To gain that added value to help sell your home, create safety and appeal with a wood, brick, stone, or resin fence. You’ll spot most metal fences in industrial areas where the business needs privacy and a low-cost fencing solution.
Using Accessories to Connect Indoor and Outdoor Motifs
Using the same style of trim and railings on the home’s exterior and interior can improve your home and its style continuity. Consider iron railing installation indoors and outdoors. On any steps leading into the home, install iron railings. Do the same inside the home by installing wrought iron railings to the staircase.
In the home’s interior, you might choose an iron staircase to replace an existing set of stairs. Using these circular wrought iron staircases in a new build can create instant appeal. Using iron creates a luxurious feel while creating little maintenance for the homeowner. Iron offers a strong, sturdy material that stands up to many years of use, and modern iron resists corrosion.
With respect to house trim, use trim that features the same cuts or scrollwork on the interior and exterior. Doing so doesn’t add to the cost, but it makes it seem like you built a custom home, even if you purchased a modular home or bought plans off of the Internet.
Also, link the paint colors from the exterior to the interior. Regardless of the color family chosen, you’ll make your home seem like a TV designer did it. Only you will know you did it yourself.
Kitchen Updates that Create Big Impact
When you improve your home, why not start with the room that you or your family probably spends the most time in every day? That’s the kitchen for most homes, the place where meal preparation and dining take place. If your home didn’t come with an eat-in kitchen or breakfast nook, you can quickly create one by revamping your counters.
Rather than a DIY project, this project requires countertop contractors. You may need to open up the interior wall behind your kitchen counters to alter the countertops, so they serve two sides of the room. This provides a food prep area on the kitchen side and a table area on the other side, typically the dining room or living room.
Your countertops will undergo a doubling in width to provide the space for dining on the other side. That only requires adding suspended counters with braces every two feet to stabilize them. Using this design offers plenty of room for people to sit on a bar stool or bar-height chair, pulled up to the counter. By leaving the space under the added counter area open, you provide plenty of legroom.
Transform Your Home with New Floors
Perhaps the fastest way to improve your home comes from replacing the flooring. Local hardwood flooring services offer an easy way to revamp your home by replacing existing carpets, tiles, or other flooring with hardwood that stands the test of time.
Similar to tile, hardwood comes in an array of colors, ranging from nearly white to black. In wood tones terms that means white ash to ebony. In between those extremes, pine, oak, walnut, hickory, and many other woods offer beiges, tans, browns, and shades of black naturally tinged with red, blue, or yellow. These vast variations require a professional contractor as a color consultant. This individual can advise you on matching the flooring to your desired wall color.
Since homeowners frequently repaint their home’s interior to update its look, consulting with this flooring professional helps you make good future choices regarding paint colors. Typically, you’d use hardwood flooring in a lighter color than the walls. Some exceptions exist, such as creating a black-on-black room with ebony flooring and dark wallpaper or wallboards.
Updating a Home’s Bathrooms
Consider working with a bath design company to improve your home’s bathroom. Modern homes with at least two bedrooms typically feature at least two bathrooms. If you purchased a home with more than one bedroom but lacking in more than one bathroom, add a bath to increase your home’s resale value. You could tack on up to $20,000 in your home’s worth by increasing the number of bathrooms above one.
This doesn’t mean constructing an addition. Consider each closet in the home. A construction professional can easily transform a walk-in closet into a bathroom, provided that the closet shares a wall with the wet wall of the existing bathroom.
Bathrooms can also go above or below the existing bathroom with some ease. That’s because the plumber can easily access the wet wall, the wall that contains the existing plumbing pipes. Because of this, a bathroom contractor can add a bath to your attic space or basement.
Consider installing frameless showers in your new bathroom or revamping existing bathrooms to feature these open-space showers. If you’ve stayed in a Marriot hotel recently, you’ve probably used a frameless shower, one that uses only a clear glass divider that separates the shower head area and water spray area from the rest of the room. Its glass partition reaches from floor to ceiling and creates the feeling of a larger space.
Create Ambiance with a Fireplace
Fireplaces create an instant home upgrade, yet a woodburning fireplace costs a small fortune to add to an existing home. Do you still want one to improve your home? Consider adding a wood pellet stove or woodburning stove. These options create the warmth and ambiance of a fireplace without the expense.
Perhaps you don’t relish cleaning a fireplace. You just want the warmth and the appearance. Choose an electric fireplace that creates flames that appear real. Similar in nature to a space heater, but with a display screen for flames, these electric heat sources provide heat for a room or home using just 1,000 to 1,500 watts of power.
But wait, there’s more. Let’s say you want real flames but modest heat because you reside somewhere like Florida or southern California where it rarely gets cold. Try a gel fuel fireplace or a biofuel liquid fireplace. These designs come in an array of options, from corner units to tabletop models.
Please note that you cannot use gel fuel in a fireplace that uses liquid biofuel, nor can you use liquid biofuel in a gel fuel fireplace. Although both fuel types come from the same sources, such as corn, the fireboxes used in the fireplace designs prove incompatible. To get the best price on fuel, purchase in bulk when the price drops, typically during late spring or summer.
Quick, Little Fixes to Transform Your Home
Maybe you want to improve your home, but major renovations elude you right now due to budget constraints. Don’t despair because many little things you change create a big impact and cost less than $50. Let’s consider some of these huge impact changes that improve your home.
Paint a room. A can of primer and two gallons of paint cost less than $50. Color decides the feel of a room, so going from a deep green to a vibrant yellow can transform a bleak room into a cheery one in an afternoon of work.
Wallpaper a room. A small room might require four regular-sized rolls of wallpaper, costing less than $50. Purchase the peel-and-stick style to save yourself the nightmare of rolling adhesive onto your paper or your walls.
Recover furnishings with pre-fabricated covers. You don’t have to spend thousands to reupholster every piece. When you need a change, buy a sofa cover, chair cover, and a new tablecloth. Drape, tuck, pin, and enjoy a fresh, new room appearance.
Purchase room rugs or throw carpets. Instead of installing new flooring over perfectly good floors that you are simply tired of looking at, cover the area with a 5′ x 8′ or 6′ x 10′ room rug. You can also update a hallway quickly with runner rugs.
Make Your House a Home
Whether you have the time and money for major renovations or you want to make a few little changes for a big impact, plan it out first, then comparison shop. Purchase materials online at stores like Temu and Amazon, which include thousands of stores on one platform. Buying materials on sale can free up the funds to let you afford a construction professional, so get shopping.