Refreshing Your Home's Exterior for Summer

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Interior styling tends to receive most of the design attention in a home. The recent Homes Extra: Small Space. Big Style article showed how much can be achieved within four walls. From the outside, though, the picture can be very different. A tired front door, a faded garage, or a dim path after dusk can quietly drag the whole frontage down. Summer is a useful season for these jobs, with the longer evenings allowing time for them. The weather behaves itself for most of the work, and small changes show their value immediately. A weekend or two is often enough to make a noticeable difference.

Start with the front door

The front door is the obvious and most rewarding place to begin. Even a well-kept door benefits from a fresh coat of paint every few years, and a change of colour can be transformative. Soft sage and deep blues sit well with traditional brick, while warmer tones like clay or muted terracotta lift a paler render. Dulux's Weathershield exterior paint colour guide is a useful starting point if you'd like to see how shades behave against different facades before committing. Don't overlook the hardware either. A new knocker, letterplate or set of numerals can pull the whole entrance together for very little outlay.

The garage door

On many Sussex homes, the garage door takes up a surprising share of the frontage, often more than the front door itself, and when it dates or discolours, it pulls the eye in all the wrong ways. A replacement is one of the most visually decisive upgrades a homeowner can make, particularly when the door is treated as a piece of the facade rather than a piece of garage equipment. A garage door has so much influence on how a home reads from the street that matching it to the character of the house matters as much as choosing the front door colour.

Wessex Garage Doors offers a guide to the different garage door styles to help narrow down which is the right fit for a particular home. For example, a traditional timber door tends to suit period frontages where character matters, GRP in wood-effect finishes brings that warmth without the maintenance, and sectional or roller designs open vertically, offering a perfect solution where driveway space is tight.

Lighting after dusk

Outdoor lighting is the change that tends to surprise homeowners most. Walk past your house at dusk and notice what you can and can't see. Wall lights on either side of the front door give a sense of welcome, while low-level path lights guide visitors in without glaring.

Warm white bulbs (around 2700K) flatter brick and stone far better than the cooler tones used for security floods, which are best kept on motion sensors round the side. If rewiring isn't on the agenda, modern solar lanterns and stake lights have come a long way and can be in place by the end of an afternoon.

Paintwork, render and trim

Window frames, fascia boards and porch trim take a quiet beating from Sussex weather, and a touch-up here and there keeps the whole exterior looking cared for. Summer is the ideal season for it: paint needs dry surfaces and temperatures above ten degrees to cure properly.

Walk the perimeter of the house and look for hairline cracks in render, peeling paint on sills, and mildew on shaded north-facing walls. Most of it is a Saturday brush down and make good rather than a major project. Where render has cracked or lifted, it's worth getting a professional opinion before painting over the top.

The finishing touch

Once the bigger pieces are in place, planting brings the front of a property to life. A pair of matching pots flanking the front door is one of the oldest tricks in the book and still one of the best, particularly for symmetrical Georgian and Edwardian frontages. For homes without a front garden, hanging baskets and window boxes do similar work for a confined entrance.

The RHS hanging basket guide is a good place to start if you'd like advice on planting combinations, including lower-maintenance options for those who'd rather not be watering daily. Geraniums, trailing verbena and ivy-leaved pelargoniums all cope happily with the odd missed watering and reward you with months of colour.

Small changes, bigger welcome

None of this needs to happen at once. A new front door colour one weekend, lighting the next, planting the weekend after, and by the time summer is properly underway the house feels actively cared for rather than passively maintained. The outside of a home is its handshake. It's worth a firm one.