Whether you’re preparing to sell your home or just want to freshen it up a bit for your own enjoyment, one of the simplest and most effective changes you can make is to change your curb-facing entrances. Everyone is familiar with the age-old phrase “curb appeal”, but it holds real meaning. Curb appeal is the effect the home has on your senses when you approach it. For visitors, this could be the first impression they have of your home. More importantly, as you return to your home each day, it’s the first thing you see and sets the mood for being home.
A tired, faded front door, even on an otherwise neatly kept façade, can greet your return home with feelings of ……. well, being tired and faded. Just by changing out your front door, it’s amazing how completely you can change the appearance of your home. And if your garage door faces the street as well, being a much larger entrance, it can have a big visual impact. Just spend a few minutes online, looking at some “before VS after” photos of front door upgrades, and you’ll quickly see the difference. A new garage door and a new front door are relatively inexpensive and can change the appearance of the house drastically, giving you a massive and immediate return on investment. And because it’s the front entrance, you’ll enjoy seeing the improvement every single day.
Winthorpe will listen to your wishes for your home’s look and present you with an array of choices to renew your home’s front entrance. Here are some common improvements we suggest.
Enlarge The Entrance
If your front door is a smaller opening in a large space, it’s usually a pretty straightforward enterprise to enlarge that doorway. This can mean simply installing a larger door for a grander feel, or it can include installing window panels on the sides of (or even above) the front door.
Just Change The Door
Maybe your front door is a thick slab of wood, 20 years old, splitting and warped. Wood doors often swell in humidity and heat and then shrink in winter weather allowing cold air to sneak into your home. Certainly, you can paint the door to make it prettier, but it still sticks when you try to shut it in July.
These days, one of the best upgrades to a front entrance is a fiberglass door. Yeah, we know that makes you cringe. You’re thinking of a cheap, plastic-looking door from years ago. But once you see a sample in person, you’ll understand how far the manufacturing of these has come. Not only are they solid, but they’re more stable than wood so they don’t warp or swell. Plus, they come in an incredible variety of finishes and looks. If you have your heart set on a wood door, we’ll get you a fiberglass door really looks like wood grain. We’ll show you three door samples where one is real wood and two are fiberglasses and you won’t be able to tell the difference. They’re that good. You can get a door with glass panels in it, a transom window above, and sidelights.
Alternatively, if you prefer a more modern look, there are lots of full-glass doors on the market that are really beautiful. Glass doors used to be poorly insulated and would drive utility bills up. But now they are multi-paned, with all sort of UV-protection and improved locking mechanisms. Pivot doors – door that are extra wide and open on a pivot joint instead of on hinges- have grown in popularity and add an extra bit of wow.
The options are almost limitless.
Change More Than The Door
For a more extreme makeover, consider adding or enlarging a porch around your front door. Building out a porch, deck, or framed stairway can completely change the look of any house. Just like there is a massive difference between hanging up a painting and hanging up a painting in a really well-chosen frame, framing your front entrance makes a difference.
If you really want to make a change, and if the layout of the home will allow for it, you might consider moving the location of the front door. Perhaps your current front door opens into the kitchen. We can move the front door to enter into the living room, which not only changes the entrance experience and the curb appeal, but reclaims some functional kitchen space as well.
Garage Doors
If your lot will accommodate the space, a really wonderful garage upgrade is to change the location of the door, or in effect, to turn the garage sideways. By moving the garage entrance to the side of the house and adding windows to the street-facing wall of the garage, that space ceases to look like a garage at all. Now, from the street, it just looks like another room of the home. Not all homes room for this option, and for those homes, we focus on changing the look of the door.
The typical older garage door is usually just a long-panel door. It may be color-matched to the house, but it’s generic. For a quick improvement, we can put trim pieces around it, give it a headpiece across the top, maybe with some lights, and add some handles. This gives it more character. Or go for the popular carriage door look, which is a charming, old-fashioned style that makes the door appear as two doors that open outwards to the side.
No matter the option you choose, changing your front entrance will make your home feel better and more beautiful immediately. You’ll find value in it, daily, and especially when your friends come over and can’t get over the new look!
