Tag Archives: curb appeal
Garage doors don’t often make news headlines
Garage doors don’t often make news headlines. But they did recently, as a woman in Holland, Ohio had a mural painted on her house depicting Oprah Winfrey. The mural was to commemorate the 25 years of her talk show, which ended recently. This shows one extreme example of garage door customization. There are other more practical options to upgrade your home’s exterior using garage doors.
Customized garage doors are an easy way to personalize your home as well as add curb appeal and value. They can make a home look more attractive and inviting, and they are generally affordable.
When deciding on new garage doors, one of the most important things to consider is what kind of material you want to use. The two most popular garage door materials are wood and metal. Wooden doors come in a great variety of colors and textures, from natural wood that can give your home a rustic feel, to popular wood paneling used to make your garage look like a carriage house. Metal doors also come in a great amount of varieties, and can be made to look similar to wooden doors.
A newly popular trend with metal garage doors is to paint them a shade lighter [more]
A Great Fix-Up Starts with your Garage Door
What’s the one home fix-up project that takes only a couple of hours and yields the biggest bang for the buck of any exterior home renovation?
Here’s a clue: This project adds style, energy efficiency and security to your home and the preparation is easy and mess free – all you need is an Internet connection and a telephone. For most people, the answer does not immediately come to mind: it’s a stylish new garage door.
Think about it. If your house has an attached garage, the garage door may comprise more than one-third of your home’s front facade. If that home is more than five years old, your garage door probably is a solid colored, raised-panel door that looks like every other garage door in the neighborhood.
A new door, quickly and correctly installed by a local professional, will differentiate your home and add style, value and curb appeal. The hottest new style in garage doors is the carriage house design. It’s available in steel, wood or composite materials and in many price ranges.
A garage door is an important home improvement project. It is typically the first thing people notice when they pull into your driveway or pass your house. Doors also [more]
Keep The Door To Your Castle In Good Shape
Garage doors are an important part of your home. They tend to take a great deal of abuse while protecting your family’s vehicles and all the other tools or valuables you have stored away.
Hockey and baseball players need a target for their shots and throws, and where better than the garage door? All this endless thumping only makes the wear and tear on the door to your garage progressively worse.
Your garage door can increase or decrease the value of your property and your home’s curb appeal, based on how well it functions or how attractive it is. It may even become a great liability or a serious nuisance if it is not fully functional. Take a close look at your garage door. Perhaps it is time to seek out a garage door service company for repair, a new door spring, or a complete replacement.
A door that is not functioning properly is a danger and a liability. An average one is likely to weigh three hundred to six hundred pounds. If this falls on a person or an automobile, it can leave quite an impression. Lessening the dangers of a garage door malfunction is the ideal if you want to protect [more]
Garage Doors Are the “Face” of Your Garage
The automobile—and a place to put it—has become a necessity of modern life, but that wasn’t the case when most historic homes were built. Creating a garage that offers the amenities you want without disrupting the period character of your home can be a tall order. The good news? Today, there are more options than ever to ease the burden.
Since doors are the “face” of your garage, choosing them is one of the most important design decisions you’ll have to make. If your garage is prominently placed in relation to your house, the style of the doors can have a major impact on your curb appeal. Pulling architectural elements from your house and replicating them on garage doors will go a long way toward striking a harmonious balance between garage and house.
The easiest way to blend house and garage is to match up their color schemes. If the design of your garage door isn’t a great fit for the age of your home, a complementary color scheme can at least help it blend in. Conversely, if you have a gorgeous traditional-style door to highlight, creative coloring (for example, painting the bracing elements on a carriage-house door the same color as [more]
‘Welcome Home, Cars’
When the car became the dominant means of transport in this country, every new house of any size had to have a garage.
Many if not most of these garages were given a prominent front-row spot – they faced the street. The phrase “attached garage” was a price booster. To be able to walk straight to it from the kitchen without braving the elements was a sign of arriviste luxury.
Often necessitated by lot size, a garage door dominates. Even when it’s not protruding, but set flush in the structure’s front, it manages to draw the eye, to make you look at – because they are closed most of the time – blank walls. The house becomes a backdrop.
“Welcome home, cars,” seems to be the greeting. Here’s the problem: Our cars are bigger and our garages are bigger. Most of our garages face the street so you can’t miss them. Bulky, boring garages make houses look bad and cheap. In certain neighborhoods, the homes look so much alike that the only way to find your house is to use the garage-door opener and see which one goes up.
There is a need to make the front elevation of the home inviting, and not [more]
Untitled
When it comes to remodeling, Americans are thinking small. It’s a reflection of the times we live in, according to Remodeling Magazine, a trade journal that each year conducts an extensive study of the typical costs of home-remodeling jobs, compared to ballpark estimates of how much of those expenditures homeowners would recoup at sale time.
The short version: Economic realities have generally snuffed out over-the-top kitchen remodels and room additions in favor of more modest jobs.
In broadest terms, the average return on investment of a remodeling project this past year at sale time was 60%, vs. 64% last year. The magazine studied tightly defined jobs on a national and regional basis, as well as for many cities. The study was conducted in collaboration with the National Association of Realtors, whose members offered payback estimates based on resale’s in their geographic areas.
The top five “moderate projects” with the strongest payback at resale time, returning 72% or more of their cost: steel entry-door replacement (at a cost of about $1,200); garage-door replacement ($1,000); wooden deck addition ($11,000); replacing 10 insulated, wooden windows clad in vinyl or aluminum ($12,000); an attic bedroom addition ($51,428).
The best bang for the buck was garage-door replacement. It was [more]