The process of selling your home is never as simple as you initially believe it to be. After all, while you might feel like your home would be a catch on the market, there’s never a guarantee that potential buyers are going to feel the same way. This disconnect is what can make it so difficult to have people notice your property. And ultimately, it can increase the challenge of getting your money’s worth out of the exchange. So, if you want to ensure that your home sells fast for the amount you want, you need to understand what individuals desire. These are some easy ways to make your home more appealing to buyers and the impact they can have on its overall value.

Clean and De-Clutter

The first step to preparing your home for showings is to ensure the entire house is clean and free of the clutter you’ve left sitting around in the past. Because it makes your space look untidy, you need to remove clutter for buyers to see your home in its best light. Otherwise, you risk it coming across as cramped and dirty.

Clutter is also responsible for the majority of the dirt and grime collection within a home, which makes an area much harder to keep clean in the long run. Consequently, you must get rid of any objects you don’t need and give the home a deep cleaning as part of the staging procedure.

Use Neutral Color Schemes

While you’re cleaning up the home, it’s also prudent to consider repainting many of your interior surfaces. Years of traffic can leave your walls scuffed and difficult to wash. This can make them appear unsightly to potential buyers and can damage their overall perspective of the home. As such, this task will allow you to freshen up the home while giving it a new aesthetic.

Speaking of which, try implementing a neutral color scheme while you’re at it. Neutrals are typically the better option when selling a home because they make the interior resemble a blank slate. This allows potential buyers to see themselves living in a particular space without the influence of your previous design choices.

Ease up on Personalization

Likewise, try depersonalizing your home as much as possible before you allow buyers to walk through it. Keeping your family pictures and personal items where they’re visible makes individuals feel as though they’re walking into someone else’s house—not necessarily theirs. Therefore, you want to eliminate these things so that their imagination can run wild. It’s through this that a buyer will be able to see all of what a home has to offer them, and they’ll develop a love for it.

Brighten the Home’s Interior

You can make the setting more interesting by finding a few ways to brighten up the interior. Darker spaces typically put off buyers because they’re less practical and energetic. When installing new lighting fixtures or simply replacing window treatments, you can bring in a lot more light and provide an entirely new perspective of the space. Brighter rooms tend to be better at helping an individual maintain focus. They also establish a positive mood.

Address Any Foul Odors

Another easy way to make your home more appealing to buyers is to cater to their sense of smell. Every home has a strange odor or two floating around. While you could mask them with aerosols, buyers walking through your house won’t have such a luxury. This is why you’ll want to tackle them at their source if you want to maintain any lasting interest in the property. Some of the most common causes of foul smells include mold or mildew, filled garbage disposals, and unsanitary surfaces. So, you’ll want to be on the lookout for these things and address them before having anyone enter inside.

Hone in on Pet Damage

If you have, or have ever had, pets, you need to consider that as well. Pets can cause several different types of damage to a home, whether they’re from bathroom accidents or chewing. For this reason, you should frequently be on the lookout for areas that you might need to redo. Typically, this will mean replacing the soiled carpet or fixing any sections of material that your pet turned into chew toys. Curtains and blinds are particularly common hotspots for destruction for both cats and dogs. So, you’ll want to check in these places too.

Focus On Curb Appeal

Remember that a home’s outside appearance is the key to getting individuals to want to look at its interior. Curb appeal is one of the most impactful features of a property because it’s the image an owner projects to the world. The nicer a house looks on the outside, the more interest you’ll see when it comes time to do showings. As such, things like a paved walkway, a welcoming front entrance, a manicured lawn, and a healthy garden can make a large difference.

Work on the Little Things

But, most importantly, take the time to work on the small issues. Though every home has a few minor problems, letting them pile up can force the new owner to undertake a collectively large repair job. Problems like pipe leaks, siding cracks, and broken window seals are all examples of things that can worsen over time if left unchecked. Buyers are even more likely to turn away from the deal upon noticing them. Therefore, tackling them now is one of the best ways to guarantee a quality property for whoever owns it next.

Getting your home ready for buyers can be a lot of work. This is why we at Bear Mountain Custom Painting seek to take some of that labor off of your plate. Our professional house painting services can take care of any interior or exterior painting you might need, while our siding and gutter installation contractors in Cumming, GA can tackle pressing repair work. We make it a point to be as accommodating as possible to the needs of each specific homeowner. Due to this, we can ensure that you’ll always see the results you need for future success.

With its warmer days and less frequent storms, summer is the prime time to complete a few pending projects around the house. However, with so many different maintenance tasks to choose from, it’s often hard to decide which ones are most worth your time. These are some of the top home improvement projects to take on during the summer and the extra value they can provide you in the long run.

Clean and Repair Your Gutters

Though your home won’t experience as much rain when the weather is warm, well-maintained gutters are essential to keeping your home safe from even the slightest showers. The cleaner these pipelines are, the easier it is for them to direct water away from your home’s foundation and prevent potential flooding. So, if you’ve noticed that your own gutter system is looking rusty or that it’s harder to clear out, you should definitely devote some of your time to fixing them this season.

Install New Windows

You should also consider installing new windows around this time of year. As the temperatures rise, your air conditioning unit will be vital to maintaining your overall comfort within the home. However, older windows tend to form drafts much easier, sucking all the cool air outside and wasting your money. Because of this, installing newer models is often the most effective way to increase your home’s performance and save you a bit of cash while you’re at it.

Fix Up Your Siding

Another important home improvement project to take on during the summer months is to upgrade or repair your home’s siding. Like other exterior components of a home, siding takes a lot of abuse from the elements. This eventually leaves it cracked, faded, and less effective than it was several years prior. Taking some time now to replace any broken parts and repaint your siding can go a long way in increasing your home’s protective abilities, as well as its value.

Whether you decide to undergo one of these projects or all of them, Bear Mountain Custom Painting can provide the perfect team to lend a helping hand. We offer a lengthy list of home improvement services ranging from new gutter repair and installation to interior and exterior home painting. This way, we’re always in a position to assist you with your renovation plans, regardless of what they entail.

After years of storms, sun, dirt, and debris, it’s common for the effects of these things to start showing on your home’s siding. Fortunately, you can fix many of these issues with something as simple as a yearly cleaning. Washing your vinyl siding is essential to removing substances that speed up its deterioration rate. So, in using these helpful tips for cleaning and protecting vinyl siding, you can make it last for much longer and keep your home looking its best.

Prepare the Surrounding Area

Before you start washing, you should first prepare the entire area around the base of your home. Cleaning your siding requires a lot of movement around the perimeter of the house. As such, the chances are greater that your plants and ornaments that sit nearby will sustain damages in the process. For this reason, we highly recommend that you cover all items in the vicinity with a tarp or move them to a different location.

Acquire the Right Cleaners

You should also spend some time finding the right type of cleaner for your home. There are various types of home siding, which means that there are also several different cleaning mixtures to choose from. Those that might work well on wooden materials might inadvertently harm vinyl and not give you the results you’re hoping for. Therefore, choosing the right ingredients will be vital to making your siding last. For vinyl specifically, mixtures made of water, vinegar, or bleach are often the most effective.

Power Wash With Care

Another important tip for cleaning and protecting your vinyl siding is to be careful when using a power washer. Though these devices are wonderful for rinsing a large area in a short amount of time, they can also cause unwanted damage in the process. Because of this, it’s important that you keep the pressure setting low and that you check for any peeling after power washing. Doing so will ensure that damage is minimal and that you attain the fresh, clean look you envision.

However, if cleanings are no longer getting the results you want, it might be time to consider a siding replacement. At Bear Mountain Custom Painting, we specialize in everything from interior painting to exterior siding and gutter work. Our siding installation services in Cumming, GA, in particular, promise beautiful and protective results that will last for years to come with the proper maintenance. So, every wash will leave your siding just as attractive as the day it was mounted.

When a rainstorm comes out of nowhere, the last thing you want to be worried about is whether your gutters can redirect all the water properly. Proper drainage will be essential to reducing your home’s risk of flooding as well as cutting the amount of damage your property sustains during this period. In fact, the better your gutter system functions, the less cleanup you’ll have to do after the fact. Here is how to improve the drainage of your home gutters and the factors that can affect their performance.

Keep Your System Clean

To maintain a steady water flow through all your gutter’s components, you first need to make sure that the piping is clean. As you’re probably well aware, gutters tend to collect an assortment of debris throughout the seasons. These items obstruct the channels where the water flows and stop them from draining as efficiently as they should, so regularly clearing this gunk out will be vital moving forward. 

Install Gutter Guard Accessories

You can also improve the drainage of your home gutters by installing an accessory to keep potential blockages out. A gutter guard is a screened device that attaches to the top of your gutter channels and prevents large debris from collecting in them. The screen portion still lets water in—allowing your system to do what it does best unhindered. Professionals can even hook up these products for you and save you the extra work.

Use Downspout Extenders

Another step you can take is to equip your downspouts with several extenders. On a basic gutter system, the downspout doesn’t deposit water very far away from your home. Though this is still helpful in preventing floods, you can further increase your odds by making this section of pipe longer. In doing so, the water runs further out into your yard, draining it in a much more effective way.

Call a Professional for Repairs

But one of the best actions you can take to make your gutters perform better is to contact a professional for repairs and advice. Since a lot of different factors can impact your gutter’s ability to drain, only expert eyes can accurately diagnose the problem and fix it. These professionals will help you replace any components or remove any clogs that are causing issues to get everything flowing smoothly again.

At Bear Mountain Custom Painting, we’ll work hard to ensure that your gutters are always functioning at their best. Whether you need a few repairs or an entirely new setup, our team of Cumming, GA gutter installation contractors is ready to take on your project. We’ll take on the grunt work so that you can weather any coming storms with ease.

While the art of painting a home requires ample skill and finesse, it’s the quality of the painter’s brushes that truly make the results stand out. Whether it’s their materials or their overall style, each aspect caters to a specific type of painting and only a few can yield the results you want for a project. This is why it’s important that industry professionals always come equipped to handle a particular job. Knowing about these tools can also help you understand how they contribute to the finished product. These are the different types of professional home paintbrushes that experts use and where they’re most effective.

Top Brush Materials

To the untrained eye, brushes often appear the same. However, if you take a closer look, you’ll realize that paintbrushes are comprised of different materials to best suit the type of paint they’ll be used with. Knowing which bristles work most effectively with certain paint products is typically half the battle when the project begins, and professionals need to commit them to memory. Listed below are the primary resources to keep in mind.

Synthetic Bristles

Synthetic bristled brushes are built using man-made resources such as nylon or polyester. They work incredibly well with a variety of different paints because they’re non-absorbent and easy to clean. However, some perform better in certain situations than others.

Specifically, brushes made of nylon are more often recommended for water-based paints since they’re better at holding onto products with a looser texture. They can also be used with oil paints—which are very popular along interior walls—but aren’t always the preferred method with these formulas.

Polyester brushes, on the other hand, are considered to be the more durable option of the two because the bristles are firmer, and they resist sticking. This is why they’re the most recommended tool to use when working with thicker latex paints. They’re capable of holding their shape through the different rigors of the application process as well. As such, they coat paint smoothly on a surface and ensure that the layer is even.

Natural Fibers

Natural fiber bushes are another popular option for professionals as they’re considered the most effective way to apply oil-based paints, stains, and clear-coat products. Because they’re made from harvested animal hairs, these bristles are capable of holding onto more paint and applying it in effortless strokes. The split ends that develop naturally along these brushes as they age further increases the amount of paint they can hold onto at a given time. This makes them highly effective at catering to a larger surface area.

Different Brush Sizes

The overall size of a paint brush is also an important feature to keep in mind. This aspect affects everything from the amount of paint a painter can apply at a given time to how precise they can make their lines. For this reason, it’s common to see professionals with brushes in several different sizes just in case they should need them. Below are the standard brush dimensions used in the industry.

One- and Two-Inch

The smallest paintbrushes that can be used for residential painting, single- and double-inch models are meant to be used on smaller surfaces or tight corners. For example, they’re typically used around window frames and other areas with small sections of trim.

Three-Inch

Brushes that are three inches wide are used for painting slightly larger objects such as doors and cabinets. They’re great for covering a larger surface area while maintaining the ability to hone in one the finer details when necessary. It’s important to mention, though, that smaller brushes are typically best for detail work.

Four-Inch

Brushes that are fourinches or longer are simply meant to hold and apply as much paint as possible in a few strokes. They allow painters to fill a designated area at a faster rate while minimizing the amount of effort they need to exert to do so. Such brushes are essential when painting an interior wall or exterior siding.

Professional Brush Styles

No guide to the different types of professional home paintbrushes would be complete without discussing their various styles. Not all paintbrushes are designed to apply a large quantity of paint. Believe it or not, many are simply meant to perform correction work or establish small details in the finished product. Bristles can be cut to accommodate these functions, and this is what we refer to as the brush’s overall style. Here are some examples to consider.

Angle Slash

Angle slash brushes have their bristles cut at a sharp slant to assist with cornering techniques. They allow the painter to spread the paint in the tightest of spaces and create a clean, crisp look when finished. Angle slash models can hold significantly more paint than thinner brushes, although thin-angle slash brushes are more effective at reaching the deepest corners.

Flat Sash

Flat sash brushes, conversely, don’t have their bristles cut at all. Instead, they promote a straight edge that establishes even lines over a flat surface. These tools also come in various sizes to suit the dimensions of the surface area. They’re great at covering a smaller surface area as well.

Trim

Trim brushes work better on larger, flat surfaces that require a lot more paint. They also have a straight edge and work especially well on exterior siding panels. These brushes are known to increase the amount of control a painter has over their work due to their finer tip.

Wall

Wall brushes are among the most commonly used style for professionals because they’re wide, thickly bristled, and boast maximum coverage. This allows the painter to load it up with much more paint than the other brush types and apply it smoothly. These models can be used on any type of home painting job and have the most versatility.

So, as you can see, professional home painters use a series of different brushes to create the stunning results you’re after. As such, it often takes someone experienced with these tools to know when each is most effectively used and how to properly apply paint with them. At Bear Mountain Custom Painting, we’re proud to say that we have some of the best painters in the business. In fact, our home exterior painting services in Cumming, GA are considered among the highest quality offered in the area. Because of this, you can be rest assured that we’ll approach your project with all the necessary equipment in-hand.

Wooden siding is one of the most beautiful and protective finishes you can have on your home. However, despite this, it can still deteriorate quickly with frequent sun and rain exposure. This could lead you to not only spend more money on repairs and replacements but also sustain damage along your interior walls. Fortunately, from the time your siding is installed to several years down the line, there’s plenty you can do to mitigate this risk. These are a few ways to make your home’s wood siding last longer and keep your property protected.

Choose the Right Style

Believe it or not, promoting the longevity of your siding begins with the type of siding you initially pick. Not all materials can withstand the same conditions. In fact, wood siding is particularly susceptible to heavy rain and sun. Because of this, you’re already setting yourself at a disadvantage should you choose wrong. On the plus side, there are several types of wood that are more resistant to moisture and will hold up better over time, such as redwood, western cedar, or cypress.

Install It Correctly

It’s also important that you get a qualified professional to Install siding in Cumming, GA. When siding is left with a series of gaps or divots between the boards, it becomes easier for it to develop water traps. As the name suggests, these areas trap rainwater and prevent it from draining away from the house. This gives it a chance to seep into the wood and start the rotting process. Therefore, hiring someone who knows how to avoid these traps will be essential.

Protect It With the Right Paint

Another effective way to make your home’s wood siding last longer is to use the right paint and sealer products on it. As mentioned above, water and sun are the primary threats when it comes to the overall lifespan of your wooden siding. For this reason, you want to use paint, sealing, or staining formulas that were created for blocking out these elements. Make sure you research your options thoroughly or ask a professional for advice on which would work best for you.

Clean and Repair It Regularly

Most importantly, stay on top of your regular cleaning and maintenance duties. Siding will deteriorate more quickly if you leave it covered with dirt and broken from past storms. So, you’ll need to spend some time doing repairs and washing away debris to ensure your siding will hold up. This process also gives you the opportunity to check for wood rot and address these issues before they become larger problems.

If you’re looking for a team of professionals that will install your new siding the right way, reach out to Bear Mountain Custom Painting. Our siding installation contractors in Cumming, GA have worked with dozens of different materials on a variety of homes. As such, we’re confident that we can complete your project in a way that maximizes its lifespan and saves you money in the years to come.