Simple Ways to Add Character to Your Home’s Exterior

If you’re looking for ways to add character to your home, and express the style you and your family love, here are a few things to try:

Make Your House Number a Feature

Almost every home has a number of some kind, unless you are living somewhere quite remote! So why not use this number as a feature? In this renovation, we selected numbers in a style that matched the style of the home exterior. We had modernized the exterior already, so we wanted modern-looking numbers to match. Then we selected a boulder as the showcase for these numbers, and stylized them with a few horizontal lines.

This isn’t the only option for your home number! There are other ways to turn it into a feature of your exterior. You might want to mount them on reclaimed wood. Or perhaps you have an antique or sculpture you’d like to make into an anchor for your house number sign.

The one major thing to consider, if you live in Edmonton, is whether they will be visible in the snow. If the numbers are too low to the ground, they can easily get covered—making your very cool feature invisible for much of the year!

Consider Your Lighting

In the last blog post, we discussed the lighting we added to the home exterior. But you don’t have to limit lighting to the actual walls of your home. In this case, we also lit up the house number with some landscape lighting.

Lighting up the house number is one option, but there may be other features of your yard you would like to highlight as well. You can light up the path to your door, or gardens you are proud of, or even trees or water features. By strategically using lights to draw attention to features you’d like to highlight, you can easily add some dimension to the look of your home. This is another way to add character to your exterior.

Use Colour to Tie Features Together

For this home, we coordinated the colour of the board we mounted the house numbers on with the colour of the gable over the garage. This was a simple way to tie this yard feature in with the home, and make the whole look appear cohesive.

Thinking about your colours and where you can repeat them is a simple way to add a little character.

Consider Zero-Maintenance Features

For this house number, we used a product called longboard, which is a metal product. It’s also zero-maintenance! Paint can be an easy way to add colour, but if you know you struggle to repaint when the paint starts to peel, it’s worthwhile to look at other options. Peeling paint adds a certain kind of character, but it might not be the type of character you meant to add!

These were a few simple ways to add character to your home exterior! After reading this you may still want a little professional advice and guidance on your exterior renovation project. This is where talking to your contractor can help! Reach out to me here at Contact Renovations and Custom Homes if you have any questions!