North Shore Views

Quick! Add Curb Appeal and Get a Leg Up on Your Competition

Spring has finally sprung on Chicago’s North Shore. The sun is out. It’s warm (for Chicago). Trees are in bloom. Buyer activity has increased dramatically.  But it’s still a buyer’s market and there are lots of houses to choose from. What’s a seller to do?

Right now you have a narrow window of opportunity to get a leg up on your competition when it comes to curb appeal. Put planters full of bright blooms on either side of your front door to welcome prospective buyers. If you have beds in front of your house, add some flowering annuals.   Since the weather will be “iffy” for a while yet, most people (including the home sellers you are competing with) don’t get serious about their yards until mid to late May. This is especially true when it comes to planting flowers, since there’s still a good chance we’ll have a frost that can kill most annuals. If you are the only seller with freshly edged and mulched beds and planters filled with welcoming blooms, your house will win the battle for curb appeal.

So, what about the problem of frost? You certainly don’t want to have a bunch of dead plants in front of your home. The answer is to select hardy annuals that can withstand a frost without being killed. Some that can take the unpredictable North Shore climate are: cornflower, foxglove, larkspur, pansy, stock, sweet alyssum and viola. The easiest, most readily available and most reliable is the pansy. They come in several colors, are available at all home centers and garden centers and are extremely cold tolerant.

Make sure you buy big, mature plants that will provide strong impact NOW.  They are more expensive than the little ones but you don’t have time to wait for the little ones to grow. Besides, once the weather gets hot, they will wilt and get leggy, and will need to be replaced by heat tolerant flowers.

Color psychologists suggest that yellow is the best color flower to use because it makes people feel happy and positive. Some go so far as to say that it puts people in a buying mood. The main thing is to choose colors that stand out against the background so they are visible from the street. You can add height to your planters by combining flowers with a taller plant, such as a boxwood (see photo above) or by adding a few pussy willow or curly willow branches to the arrangement.

Tags: home selling tips

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 8:24 am and is filed under Home staging, Real estate, Selling a home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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