Essential Exterior Maintenance Jobs To Complete Before Selling Your Home
Selling a home, at its very heart, is all about image. The way your home looks from the outside will form a potential buyer’s first impression. If it doesn’t look up to code, is dirty and flaking away, and even shows signs of long term damage, no one will want to buy the house from you!
That’s why exterior maintenance is essential before putting the house on the market. It’s not something you can leave a new owner to do, unlike certain interior work. It’s something you need to sort out before you take pictures for the listing.
And in terms of keeping costs low while you fix up your curb appeal, we recommend focusing on the essential exterior maintenance jobs in the list below.
Clip Back Any Plants
Front lawns are a lovely addition to your curb appeal, but they can get overgrown, patchy, and discolored over time. You’re going to need to fix up any holes, do a lawn treatment, and clip back anything that’s growing out of control.
Bushes and hedges should be the first thing you prune. You may even need to remove a hedge or tree entirely, if it’s an old plant that’s slowly died off in recent years.
It may look good from the outside, but if the inner leaves are brown and shrivelled, pop some tarp down, get your shears, and clip back until you can easily remove the whole thing.
Wash Down the Curb
Grime build ups are a common exterior issue. Years of dirt have caked themselves onto your driveway, pathway, and the siding of your home. As such, the colors have faded over time, and you might not have even noticed it!
But if you look at pictures of the house from when you bought it, and compare them to right now, you’ll see just how much darker and shabbier the property looks. You can’t expect it to sell in this condition!
Right now, you need to get a pressure washing service out to clean up your curb and wash that grime away. You can always rent a pressure washing unit yourself as well, but depending on the scale of the job, that could be a lengthy, unsafe task to take on alone.
Relay the Pathway
If you’ve got a pathway that leads up to your porch, deck, or front door, it’s usually worth lifting off the old material and relaying it.
Whether this means removing the paving slabs or simply shifting off the old shingle or gravel and pouring down some new stuff, do so before popping your property on the market.
If the paving is cracked from where weeds have grown through, or has been worn down by use over time, we definitely recommend getting this job done before welcoming viewers in!
Want to sell your home? Get the exterior washed, dried, painted, and pruned first! Your curb appeal will make or break a buyer’s snap judgement, so give them plenty to work with.
