Your home’s curb appeal plays a key role in its perceived value. Whether you just want to improve the look of your home to appease your tastes or are looking to attract more buyers as a seller, it all starts with amazing curb appeal.

But boosting the look of your home’s exterior doesn’t have to put a huge dent in your bank account. There are plenty of little projects you can take on to improve your curb appeal for less than $100, including the following.

1. Buy a New Doormat

That “Welcome” doormat at the foot of your front door might not be so welcoming anymore if it’s all ratty and has seen better days. A quick and cheap way to make a change to your home’s entrance is to replace the mat with something new. There are tons available out there for far less than $100, though you can always splurge if your pocketbook allows for it.

2. Add Bark Mulch

It’s amazing what a difference a little bark mulch can make in the look and feel of an outdoor garden. New mulch can instantly spruce up your flower beds and shrubs. Not only does it significantly improve the aesthetics of your outdoor landscaping, but it can also prevent your garden from becoming overwhelmed by weeds. Replacing your mulch is a cheap endeavor and can do wonders for the greenery in your yard.

3. Cut the Grass and Trim the Hedges

This might sound obvious, but it’s worth mentioning. You could spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a professionally-designed landscaping job, but it will be all for naught if you don’t keep up with the lawn mowing and hedge trimming. Overgrown grass and hedges will take away from the appeal of your home’s exterior. Sure, this will require regular maintenance on your part, but the good news is that it won’t cost you a cent.

4. Update Your Front Door

If your front door is scaring people away from knocking, it might be time for a change. While completely replacing the door would be ideal, you might find it hard to find something for less than $100. Instead, all you might need to do is reface the front door with a little paint. Just be sure to sand it down if necessary before painting in order to ensure a smooth and seamless look when you’re done.

5. Replace the Door Knob and Lock

While you’re refacing the front door, consider changing the knob or lock. This hardware can easily become worn over time, so sometimes replacing them can make the door – and your home – look more up-to-date.

6. Add Planters Beside Your Front Door

Flanking your front door with a couple of planters can give your entrance an instant update with a splash of color without breaking the bank.

7. Plant Some Flowers

If your landscaping is lacking in color, consider planting a few flowers throughout your front lawn. Just be sure to come up with a simple design first so the final look is cohesive.

8. Install a New Porch Light

If your porch doesn’t have a light, now’s the time to get one. A little light at the front entrance is not only functional, but it adds to the aesthetics of your home overall.

If you have a porch light but it’s showing major signs of wear and tear, swap it for a new model. While there are plenty of expensive and extravagant models out there, you can also find more affordable options that will do just as good a job at improving the curb appeal of your home.

9. Replace Your House Numbers

You might not even think about your house numbers, but they’re just another piece of the puzzle to the overall look of your home’s exterior. You can either repaint the numbers you already have or replace them altogether with something a little more modern.

10. Reface Your Mailbox

Your home’s mailbox is not purely functional, but it’s also a decorative element of your home’s curb appeal. If you can’t find a replacement for less than $100, you can always repaint it to give it a fresh new look at a fraction of the price.

11. Clean Your Windows

It doesn’t take long for your home’s windows to get covered in dirt, dust, debris, and dead bugs. Give your windows a thorough wash to get them gleaming and shining. Not only will this help the way your home looks on the outside, it will also allow a lot more natural light in from the inside too.

12. Paint Your Window Shutters

If your windows are surrounded by shutters, consider giving them a new paint job. It’s a cheap and quick way to update the look of your home’s exterior.

13. Clear Out Your Front Deck

All those shoes, stacked-up patio furniture, and debris that may have piled up in the corner need to be cleaned out. Keep only what you need to create a comfortable and stylish outdoor space in order to improve your home’s curb appeal.

The Bottom Line

Curb appeal speaks volumes, especially when you’re trying to sell for top dollar in a reasonable amount of time. But you don’t have to spend the big bucks to improve your home’s curb appeal. Try any one of these projects to give your home’s exterior a boost without making a hole in your pocket.

It’s that time of year. Many homeowners dread spring cleaning, but it’s a necessary task when you consider how many things typically get overlooked as part of every-day cleaning. You might vacuum, wash dishes, and do laundry regularly, but there are plenty of other tasks that probably don’t get done.

Here are few things that you should include in your spring cleaning checklist.

1. Ceiling Fans

You might not be able to see it, but there is probably a thick layer of dust on top of the blades of your ceiling fans. Now, imagine turning them on and allowing all that collected dust to make its way into the air that you breathe in.

For this reason, it’s essential that your ceiling fans are a part of your spring cleaning session. You can use a vacuum cleaner with an extended nozzle, a duster, or even a damp cloth to get rid of all that piled-up dust.

2. Underneath Large Appliances

You might vacuum your floors on a regular basis, but over time, a lot of dust and debris can make their way underneath your large appliances. Be sure to pull out the refrigerator, oven, washer, and dryer and clean the areas that have been covered by these appliances throughout the year.

3. Utensil Drawers

Once a year, you may want to pull out your utensil drawers, take everything out, and clean the inside of them thoroughly, including the back, sides, and corners. Make sure you let them dry completely before you replace all of your utensils.

4. Coffee Makers

Not only should the actual coffee pot be cleaned out, but so should the filter. Be sure to take your coffee machine apart every so often to give it a good cleaning in warm water mixed with white vinegar.

5. Oven

It’s easy for your oven to collect a layer of hard-to-remove grime at the base or along the sides of the interior. All that grease spilling over from your casseroles or the dripped cheese from those oven-baked pizzas can build up a layer of stubborn, caked-on grease that will need to be removed.

If you’ve got a self-cleaning oven, your job just got that much easier. But if you don’t, you’ll need a few hours to allow oven-cleaning products to lift all that built-up grime, or else you’ll be using a lot of elbow grease to scrape it off that hard way.

6. Pillows

When was the last time you tossed your pillows into the washing machine? Pillow cases can only do so much to protect the pillows underneath, which are susceptible to being infested with skin oils, dead skin cells, dust, and even spiders, to name a few.

In fact, you shouldn’t even wait until spring cleaning time to wash your pillows. Instead, they should probably be washed once every month or two.

7. Window Screens

Window screens are not only meant to help keep critters out as you allow fresh air indoors, they’re also meant to help trap dust and debris. After a while, window screens can become inundated with particles that can limit their effectiveness. Not only that, window screens that are filled with dirt just look disgusting.

You may be able to wash out all that dirt by simply spraying them with a hose. For more stubborn debris, you will have to remove the screens from their frames and soak them in warm, soapy water before spraying them down and replacing them.

8. Drapery

It’s easy for all your window treatments to absorb odors in the home. Not only that, they can also get dusty and dirty over time. In addition to being unsightly, this can also be a potential health issue for anyone in the home with allergies or asthma.

Depending on the fabric and size of your drapes, you may be able to toss them into the washer. Otherwise, you may want to have them dry cleaned to make sure any delicate materials are handled with care.

9. Shower Curtains

Shower curtains get wet on a daily basis, and unless you thoroughly dry them after every shower, they’ll typically stay wet for hours. This is the ideal breeding ground for mold and mildew. Again, this is an item that should be cleaned much more frequently than once a year at spring cleaning time.

You can clean them by adding them to the washing machine along with your towels. Just make sure to let them drip dry rather than putting them in the dryer.

10. Telephones

More and more homeowners are opting to ditch their home lines in favor of their cell phones. A land line is just another added expense that many homeowners no longer require when they’ve got their cell phones to communicate with the outside world. But if you’re one of the minority homeowners who still has a traditional telephone hooked up to a land line, you may want to give those receivers a good cleaning.

So many hands and mouths make contact with telephone receivers, so imagine how much illness-causing bacteria or viruses may be on these things! Don’t forget to disinfect all the phones in your home, and while you’re at it, clean your smartphones too.

Final Thoughts

Spring cleaning might not be fun, but it’s got to be done. And to make the most of this labor-intensive job, make sure you’ve got everything covered so you can enjoy a thoroughly clean home throughout the remaining months of the year.

Open concept floor plans have become incredibly popular among homeowners and buyers. As such, many homeowners have been opting to knock out existing walls in their homes in order to swap their traditional segmented layout for something more open and free-flowing.

You might want to knock down a wall in your home to open up the kitchen to the living room, or to combine two bedrooms into one larger space, for instance. But before taking a sledgehammer to a wall, it’s imperative to make sure that it’s not a load-bearing one.

There are certain walls in a home that are actually carrying a great deal of weight, so arbitrarily knocking one down can be disastrous if the necessary precautions aren’t taken to distinguish between a load-bearing wall versus a cosmetic partition.

The question is, can a load-bearing wall be torn down? If so, how would this be done?

Yes, load-bearing walls can be removed, but not without invasive measures. These types of walls are integral to the overall structure of a home. As such, removing them without the proper precautions can compromise the structural integrity of the home.

That said, it’s typically not recommended to remove these walls. If the necessary measures aren’t taken to replace them with something that will adequately support the weight of the home and distribute this weight to the ground, any components above the wall will not be properly supported.

This can lead to cracking and settling in the walls above or in ceilings and floors close to where the load-bearing wall was. It can even cause an upper-level floor to eventually cave in over time.

How to Identify a Load-Bearing Wall

Before a wall is slated to be removed, you’ll want to determine whether it’s a load-bearing wall or not. To do that, you’ll want to look at the lowest point of the home, such as the crawl space. If the space is unfinished, you’ll have an easier time located the beams that are holding up the weight of the structure and transferring it to the ground.

Finding these beams will give you a good idea of where the home’s weight is being supported. Any walls directly above these beams are likely load-bearing. These are typically located along the length of the home or near its center.

You can also check out the floor joists. If they are visible (again, in an unfinished space), pay attention to the direction they go in. Many times, load-bearing walls are placed perpendicular to floor joists. This is especially true if there’s a wall located right on top of another, though this isn’t always the case.

If the beams have been covered in drywall, it can be much more difficult to determine which walls are load-bearing. Unless you are a professional, this task is best left to the experts. An experienced contractor or engineer would be better qualified to identify which walls are carrying the weight of the structure versus those that are not.

Removing Load-Bearing Walls

Once a load-bearing wall has been identified and scheduled to be removed, the proper permits will have to be obtained first. Considering the importance of such a component of a home, it should come as no surprise that the local building permit office will want to know about any work that is being done to make sure it’s conducted safely and results in a structurally-sound home.

When a load-bearing wall is removed, it will need to be replaced with something else that will just as effectively carry the weight of the structure and distribute this weight to the ground. Usually, load-bearing walls that are removed are replaced with horizontal beams of adequate size on their own, or with one or more vertical posts upon which the horizontal beam rests.

While vertical posts (or columns) might not necessarily provide that completely open concept look, they can still offer more support and therefore much more strength to the horizontal beam.

The Bottom Line

While load-bearing walls may be able to be removed – either partially or completely – it’s usually best to leave them intact. If you do choose to have one removed from your home, be sure to employ the professionals in this realm. Removing a load-bearing wall is not an easy job, and can even be potentially dangerous if not done properly. That said, it can provide you with that highly-coveted open concept floor plan that you desire if done right.

Are you planning to buy an older home? If so, there are a lot of things you’ll want to know about the home, including whether or not there’s any asbestos present.

You might wonder if asbestos even exists anymore. Sure, it was used quite often in home construction decades ago, but is it still around today?

It’s rare for asbestos to be used in new home construction, so the odds of finding it in a home that was built after 1980 is pretty slim. But homes that were built before the 80s could potentially still have asbestos lurking within its walls and ceilings.

The Danger of Asbestos

Asbestos is basically a group of naturally-occurring minerals that have been used in all sorts of building materials and other types of products for decades.

The problem with asbestos is that if it’s inhaled over a certain amount of time, it can cause serious respiratory problems, including asbestosis, mesothelioma, and even lung cancer. That’s why it’s not typically used in home construction very much, though it hasn’t been entirely banned as some may falsely believe.

The thing about asbestos is that it’s actually harmless if it’s untouched. The issue arises when the material that contains asbestos is disturbed and particles from the material become airborne. At this point, the dust particles that are released into the air that contain asbestos can be breathed in, which is where the hazard lies.

If you plan to buy an older home and are considering doing some home improvement projects, you will want to know if asbestos is present or not before you start knocking down walls or ripping out ceiling material. Asbestos can be lurking anywhere in the home, so identifying its presence is important before any work is done.

Where is Asbestos Typically Found in a Home?

The natural properties of asbestos make it an ideal and affordable fire retardant. Because of that, it was added to all sorts of different building products, especially between the 1940s to the 1970s. Some of the more common building materials that asbestos can be added to include:

• Insulation
• Popcorn ceiling material
• Ceiling Tiles
• White tape on heat ducts
• Cement siding
• Glue under flooring

How Can You Tell if Asbestos Exists in a Home?

It’s impossible to know for sure whether or not asbestos is present in a home just by looking around. The only way to identify the existence of asbestos is by having the material in question tested.

Before you sign on the dotted line and take possession of a home you’re interested in buying, make sure to include a home inspection contingency. This will give you the chance to scope out the home in great detail to find out if there’s anything that warrants further attention. Although testing for asbestos isn’t typically part of the average home inspection, your inspector may be able to get tiny samples from the property that can then be tested appropriately.

If the home you want to buy was built before the 1980s and you plan on doing some upgrades, you’ll want to know if asbestos exists or not. As such, you may want to consider hiring an asbestos inspector to identify whether or not it’s there. At-home test kits are available, but this is not the type of material that you will want to handle on your own.

Ideally, the seller will disclose the presence of asbestos in the home before you buy it if it’s something that they are aware of. Unfortunately, many sellers are typically unaware of the presence of asbestos in their homes, especially if they’ve never done any improvements while living there.

The Bottom Line

Asbestos can be expensive to remove, so you will want to know if it exists in a home you are buying. It’s possible for asbestos to be found in just any area of a home. And the older the property is, the higher the risk of asbestos being found somewhere.