Fall wreaths are the best way to welcome guests into your home and set the tone for beautiful curb appeal this season. Before Hurricane Irma, we had removed all of our front porch furniture and it stayed looking dark and dreary until I partnered with Lowe’s to feature their Fall Harvest outdoor decor items, including fall wreaths. Take a look at how I welcome autumn to my porch with their wreaths for autumn, as well as fresh flowers and harvest finds!

(Roll over the picture to find out more details on where you can find these items at your local Lowe’s or on Lowes.com)

I Loved the Fall Wreaths at Lowe’s for my Front Door

As you already know wreaths are a huge part of my life from my How To Make a Burlap Wreath sister site. On that site, I highlight gorgeous wreath tutorials for every season, occasion and also list by materials. The fall wreaths at Lowe’s are perfect for any decorative style and I chose their Holiday Living 22-in Orange Indoor Gourd Artificial Thanksgiving Wreath. The mixture of gourds, pumpkins, feathers, and leaves is the perfect grapevine wreath to celebrate the season. What I love even better? That I can keep this up throughout October and November!

Our “Before” front porch was dark and dreary

Fall Wreaths Pair Beautifully with Lowe’s Pumpkins, Topiary and Planted Flowers

Color and textures are the simplest way to bring warmth to your front porch. After I put my own porch furniture back, I used Lowe’s potted yellow mums flowers and their craft pumpkins in varying sizes around the porch.

I think fall wreaths always look better when they have another element to pull them together. The Holiday Living Pumpkin Topiary with White LED Lights also adds vertical height next to the front door. I love how the grapevine pumpkin topiary also lights up at night.

Here’s the Lowe’s Fall Decorating Pieces I Paired with My Wreath

I couldn’t resist getting these happy yellow mums and playful pumpkins to go alongside the pillows!

How Will you Decorate your Fall Porch this Season?

I encourage you to take a look at Lowe’s Fall and Halloween outdoor decorations. They have a wide array of styles that will perk up your outdoor home.

If you need inspiration ideas peruse through your local Lowe’s and see what ideas they have.

For more wreaths ideas I encourage you to visit the Fall Wreaths category on How To Make a Burlap Wreath.com

Simple Tips to Bring Autumn to your Front Door this Season

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Wreaths or Swag

Wreaths or swags are possibly the most common elements that are used to décor the front door during autumn. What you have to take care is if the front door wreath is complementing to the design and color of your porch and entryway. Traditional harvest, autumn foliages, artificial or natural fruits and flowers, peacock feathers, acorns, pinecones, etc. are common materials used for making such wreaths. You can either buy or custom-make such a wreath and hang on your front door.

Instead of wreaths, you can go for buckets full of fall flowers too. Attach a hook to your door and hang one or two rustic-style bucket filled with fall blooms like small sized flowers and red-colored berries. Swag wreaths offer a gorgeous way to display rustic elements like this Autumn Wreath Swag are nice additions to welcome guests. Visit our fall wreaths on How to Make a Burlap Wreath!

Use Fall Harvest & Plants

Gourds and pumpkins are common fall harvest and are essential part of fall décor. Line the front steps of your home with metallic or wooden gourds and pumpkins and pots of fall flowers like asters, mums, heuchera, verbena, oxalis, etc. Hang a door-framing garland made of black feathers. This garland and pumpkins will bring an early Halloween feel into your porch.

Budget-Friendly Ways to a Backyard Transformation

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Colored concrete for your Backyard Transformation

If a fancy mosaic of pavers isn’t in the cards due to the cost of materials and labor, then consider colored concrete as a viable option. Whether you want to spice up your current patio by having a pro come out and stain it for you or you’d like to create a unique pressed mosaic by laying your own concrete slab, embossing it with a mold while wet, and then hand-staining it yourself, this is a less expensive way to get the custom look you crave and add some visual interest to an otherwise bland backyard.

Backyard Sanctuary ideas – Create islands.

Planting is a great way to add color and variety to your yard, but limiting yourself to beds and garden planters around the perimeter of your house and fence line can be a bit passé. Instead, draw a scale model of your yard and experiment with the placement of islands. Once you’ve found a configuration you like, tear out the sod, add a mound of dirt, tamp it down, and then plant. You can add trees, shrubbery, and a variety of flowering plants that will bloom in different seasons. And all you have to do is add cypress wood mulch or wood chips for a finishing touch that will keep the plants in place and help the soil to hold moisture until the ground cover fills in.

Patio arbors and pergolas.

Building a covered deck or installing a motorized awning simply might not be in your budget. But if you want some less expensive cover that will also add beauty to your yard, a pergola or arbor may be an ideal solution. They’re not terribly difficult to build (although you can find some low-cost prefab options) and you can train a variety of vines to grow up and over the slats in order to create a leafy, shade-giving roof in the summer.

Improve your landscaping and lawn areas:

Brown, patchy lawns are uninviting and off-putting. Weeds create a miniature backyard jungle harboring unwanted pests and rodents. Nobody likes a dead lawn or one that is infested with crabgrass. Basic, fundamental lawn care practices can help bring life back to your backyard without breaking the bank on expensive fertilizer programs. For example, is the right type of grass planted in your backyard? The backyard is usually where all of the gathering takes place and definitely where the family dog spends most of his or her time. So, homeowners are going to want to have a traffic resistant grass type in their backyard. For example, homeowners in a place like Birmingham, Alabama are most likely going to want to have Bermuda grass because it’s fast repairing, handles traffic well, and requires less maintenance than most grasses. To save money you can use seed instead of uprooting the entire lawn and replace it with sod. Because Bermuda grass (though a beautiful lawn choice) is also one of the world’s most pesky weeds it can easily overtake a lawn by spreading enough seed. Of course, other things come into play like mowing once a week and watering deeply and infrequently. However, switching your type of grass can be easy to way to boost your backyard aesthetic.

Hanging Lanterns and Outdoor Lighting

Installing lighting fixtures and outdoor lighting. throughout your outdoor space can be incredibly pricy, but luckily there are less expensive ways to implement the illumination needed to keep your afternoon soirees going late into the evening. You can purchase colorful paper lanterns at import markets or even dollar stores, in some cases. And hanging them is a cinch. You can either place poles strategically throughout the yard and run light strings between them (hang the lanterns on after) or you might dangle individual bulbs from tree branches. You could even hang lights from the edges of your pergola! From there it’s easy enough to hide the main power cable under the turf as it runs back to the outlet on the side of your house.

We love these outdoor lighted planters for your backyard.

DIY water features for your Backyard Transformation

Adding custom logo water features to your yard won’t help you to save money, but you can still get the serenity of a garden water feature by implementing your own aquatic installation. There are all kinds of tutorials online that will help you to create a water wall, koi pond, or drip system, just for example, and many require just a few basic items from the hardware store and a little creativity on your part when it comes to adding a touch of beauty.

For more outdoor ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

DIY Summer Idea: How to Build Arbor for your Backyard

The beauty that an arbor brings to your home design makes it so popular. In fact, it’s amazing how many beautiful designs you can have for your arbor. You will definitely have a design that will fit your preference. However, there are basic parts that arbor should have. Check out these tips on how to build an arbor for your backyard:

Work on your arbor base

The base is an essential part of the arbor. This should not take too much of the arbor area. As a rule of thumb, your base area should be smaller than you have in a patio seating area. The base should not dominate the intended area like the garden or pathway. However, the base should be presentable and stable.

How to build arbor video:

Choose your wooden horizontal beams

This structure will serve as the roof of your arbor. Although this is not like the roof of your home that restricts rain, this structure is good enough to provide a shade. The horizontal beams are arranged with a few inches gap in between. The space allows sunlight to pass through and give light to the area.

Here are some tips from BHG to build an arbor or a pergola.

Consider putting garden decor around your arbor.

Your arbor will look good as it is but the arbor is definitely better with decorative items surrounding the structure. You can install some decorative lighting fixtures on your base and horizontal beams. Other arbors are surrounded with plants for additional beauty.

There are also arbor kits you can buy if you’d like. We like these arbor kits!

You will definitely love the looks of your exterior with an arbor installed in your backyard. It’s a beautiful addition to your existing structure outdoor.

For more outdoor ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

Beautify Your Outdoor Home with these Types of Fences

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There are various fence designs to choose from. These may vary from the materials used and style. Here are some of the popular fence designs to help beautify your outdoor home. For more types of fences check out these 9 fence types.

Types of Fences: White Picket Fence

This design is very iconic. For some, the white picket fence is a symbol of the ideal middle-class suburban life of a decent family lifestyle. It is not merely tracing a property line but a frame which flowers like roses and other attractive plants may grow. Since it is white, the presence of flowers will highlight once it is full grown. This will definitely bring beauty to the totality of your home. Houzz gives some great tips for choosing the right fence for your home.

Vinyl Fence come in Fence Panels

Other types of fences include vinyl fencing. The vinyl fence portrays simplicity and elegance. With its flexibility in design, a vinyl fence can enhance and reveal your landscape. It is also durable as it is longer lasting than wood. It won’t fade, rot, corrode or rust. You can design the vinyl according to your budget, functionality, and location. Since it is made of plastic, you can count on its high-quality resistance against the sun and any weather condition that may create cracks and breaks.

A Wood Fence can be Painted or Stained

Many homeowners prefer types of fencing that adds rustic charm to their outdoor home. There is nothing like wood for natural warmth and beauty. You can choose from wide varieties of wood types according to your desired fence style. Also, consider the type of wood that is suitable for the climate and weather conditions in your area. For lasting beauty and durability, you should paint or apply waterproof sealer to your wood fence right after the installation. This should be done every three or four years after. If it is left untreated, wood fencing will weather naturally. If your climate has salt water in the air consider brushing waterproofing over your fence periodically to keep the wood from rotting. Here’s some wood style fences to choose from.

Take time to choose which type of fence you want according to your preferences and availability of materials. Whether you choose a fence based the aesthetics of your outdoor home or material, there is a fence perfect for your outdoor home.

For more outdoor home ideas on Stagetecture, click here.

How to Stage a Home with Confidence 

Buyer Appeal is your Main Priority

Almost every home, condo or apartment can benefit from staging. The goal of home staging is to create a mood that buyers can emotionally respond to. Every house can look better with carefully placed plants, flower arrangements, updated lighting & appliances, less clutter, and less personalized statements and images. The potential buyer wants to walk into a house and see himself or herself – not the current family in a picture perfect frame in each room. No house is perfect – but staging works to help overcome any imperfections your house may have.

Catch the Buyers’ Attention with your Home Staging Efforts

Like anything else in this world, you have only a few second to catch someone’s attention. For an advertisement, it’s about 3 seconds, for most buyers it’s 7 seconds after stepping over your home’s threshold. Over 95% of buyers agents say that home staging has some effect on the buyers’ opinion of your home and 32% of buyers’ agents believe staged homes increase the dollar value buyers are willing to offer by one to five percent.

HGTV gives you 30 can’t miss home staging ideas to help your moving efforts.

Staging a home isn’t an option; it’s a requirement these days. With good staging, buyers will recognize how your home could be their new home. By following a few useful tips and tricks of the trade you can stage your home in an effective way that showcases the best assets of the house, impresses buyers and sells promptly. With bad staging, your home could be left languishing on the market for much longer than you’d like.

Keep Your Budget in Mind to Avoid Over-Staging

When staging your house, there are rooms that can yield more benefit than others. In addition to the ever-effective curb appeal updates such as mulch, new shrubs, and simple decorating tips, we have focused on the 3 most important rooms of the house: living room, master bedroom, and kitchen.

Houzz lends 21 staging tips to help you sell your home.

Did these tips help you learn how to stage a home? Go through your home and determine what is a high priority. These home staging tips should help you save money, make your home more appealing to prospective buyers and help it sell more quickly and at a potentially higher price than an empty, white-walled or over-cluttered house.

How to Stage a Home Infographic:

Take a look at this infographic that sums up all you need to consider when staging your home. It’s perfect to pin to Pinterest and to keep referring back to.

For more home staging tips and moving tips look to these categories on Stagetecture.

How to Beautify your Home with Garden Decor

Intimate Gathering Space

Just create a cozy, nice space to have your morning tea or evening coffee and enhance the beauty of your garden in the process. Prepare the ready-for-entertaining spot by surrounding a table with a couple of rattan armchairs, a fire pit, and one or two freestanding umbrellas. If you want to enjoy some quality time with your loved one, just keep a small, bright-colored table with two chairs. Decorate the table with two tiny potted plants and you’ll have a small retreat with lovely natural scenario around.

If you want to add a touch of fun by adding tropical punch to the seating area, Real Simple has a lovely idea.

Colorful Vertical Garden

Whether you already have a garden blooming with colorful flowers or lovely seasonal produce or not, adding up a vertical garden along the fence will further add up to the curb appeal. Spray paint some cans with bright colors, plant flowers in them, and attach them to the fence. Choose bright colors as the pot paint, which will create a stunning consonance with the red, blue, or yellow flowers in the pots. Plus, the bright pots and flowers will breathe life into your garden decorations.

Decorative Lanterns

Lighting can bring a dramatic change to any place of your outdoor home decor. The warm glow of lighting has the magic in it to transform a confined outdoor garden into a cozy one. If you have trees nearby the seating area in the garden, hang three to four lanterns sporadically from some low-hung branches. Some ornamental tree-hung lanterns casting moody glow over beds of green grasses will take the visual of the place to another level.

The lanterns will create a festive look when you will throw a summer party during the hotter season.

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Garden Ornaments

Ornaments add another dimension to a landscape and give it a unique charm. Garden ornaments can effectively transform the look, shape, and feel of your garden decor. A wrought-iron gate, a display of used garden tools, a curved bench, etc., if carefully placed, can offer subtle but effective clues.

This garden fountain turned into a charming planter in Better Homes and Garden is lovely, isn’t it?

These garden decor ideas can give your outdoor home a finished look for all the four seasons. The trick is doing what you can pull off and to not overdo it. Our tips for garden decorations are pretty basic and you can make them work for any place of your outdoor garden.

Want more garden decor ideas for your interiors? Why not try adding a gorgeous natural wreath to your front door? How To Make A Burlap Wreath has tons of ideas!

Outdoor Home: Fun Mailbox Ideas

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Get Inspired By On Screen Heroes

Is there a character that you and the kids absolutely adore? Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc. Get yourself a nice character inspired mailbox and let the heroes welcome your mail. A number of online stores have these readily available at a great price! And if you are a keen craftsman, sculpture it out in your garage workshop.

Reuse & Recycle

Kids usually have these large toy trucks and buses that lie idle once they loose their interest in them. Bring these to good use and recycle them into a more usable avatar. These toys which are mostly hollow inside make for excellent mailboxes and can be quick crafted into beautiful sculptures with a little effort.

Classic Old School

This genre never goes out of fashion. A classic wrought iron mailbox, fitted perfectly into the brickwork posts makes up for a very handsome alternative. Such mailboxes blend very well with your existing landscape and add and old world charm to your curb. And the best part is, that old school is evergreen.

Miss Countryside?

Do you miss country life, farm life or the laid back life of smaller towns and villages. Well, there is a souvenir that you keep forever. Yes, you guessed it right! Farm animal mailboxes! You might have to hire a local carpenter to sculpt one for you but its worth all the effort:)

Paint It As You Like

Well this one uses old mailboxes and revamps them into new. You can either paint them in your favorite shades or just stencil out unique patterns and motifs on them. Stencils can be simply crafted at home using thick card sheets or medium thickness cardboard box. You can even stencil out alphabets and numbers! So what about some name and address markings out there.

Mailboxes are attracting much attention these days because they do a lot to enhance the curb appeal. People almost make an impression about you and your home, right at the curb. So why not get it right. A few of these mailbox ideas require a little bit outside help and a few can be easily crafted at home. Take your pick and share your wonderful mailbox ideas with us.

Click here for more Outdoor Home Ideas on Stagetecture!

Innovative mailboxes will add character to your front yard landscaping and increase the curb appeal of your home. Let’s take a look at some unique mailbox design ideas:

Mailbox Ideas: Updating your Outdoor Home 

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Coordinate your Outdoor Home

Coordinating the mailbox design with your outdoor home design will enhance your landscape decoration and bring a personalized touch to your front door, porch, and gate. For example, if you have copper accents on your home’s exterior, a copper mailbox or one spray painted with copper color will match the color palette and create a lovely look.

Personalized Painting

Fixing or updating your mailbox could be your first outdoor project this summer and you can later switch to bigger projects like making shutters or painting the exterior. If you don’t have enough budget to spend behind a mailbox, painting is the easiest and cheapest option. Paint your faded, rusty mailbox with bright colors. Use it as a canvas to draw pictures of flowers, leaves, any scenery, or something funny.

Curb Appeal Ideas: Personalize your Mailbox

Which profession are you in? Are you a doctor, engineer, or a photographer? A first-aid box, an engineering toolbox, or a camera mailbox will look different and add interest to your outdoor living spaces. Such a design will display your creativity besides reflecting your profession. Are you a chiropractor? What can show off your profession more than a mailbox with your name painted on it and a vertebral column as the mailbox post?

Mailbox Ideas: Show Your Sports Love

Are you a football freak or crazy over basketball? Can you happily spend hours to watch golf? Why do not you design your mailbox after your favorite sport? Adding a mailbox that looks like a golf ball or a football is a nice way to tell others about the sport you love. Others can also draw inspirations from such type of unique mailbox designs.

Add Enhancing Accents with Creative Mailbox Ideas

Adding a few accents to your old mailbox can also be a great way to update it without spending for a new one. Planting a mini-garden around your mailbox will increase its beauty manifold and add curb appeal to your outdoor home. The plants need to be extra tough and resilient to tough weather like extreme heat, much snow, and winter salt. Some mailbox posts come with a little planter attached, which is suitable if there is no scope to create a garden around it.

These unique mailbox design ideas will allow you to personalize your outdoor home and add a decorative accent to your front yard and landscape. They will catch the attention of the onlookers and help your home to stand out in the neighborhood.

What is your plan to update your outdoor home mailbox? Share with us!

Outdoor Home: Summer Ideas For Your Front Door

Image Via: Snap Creativity

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A Pop of Warm Color!

When I say yellow, I don’t literally mean only yellow! What I mean to emphasize is the fact that bright accent colors are just perfect for front doors during summers. You can use bright yellows, jazzy reds or striking apple greens. The idea is to add color to the dry and lifeless summers. Isn’t it nice if the front door brings a whiff of fresh air into the dull outsides.

Image Via: Preston Lane

A Checkered Pattern

Summers are all for transparency. Don’t we love to use light curtains and see through divider screens in our interiors? Well, the outdoor home deserves some transparency too! Use a checkered pattern as shown in the image below. Let the basic framework be carved out of wood and the square inserts be decked with glass. If you are worried about the door fitting into winter attire later in the year, use frosted or echoed glass instead.

Image Via: Michael Fullen Design Group

Shades Of Vintage

Painting the front door in shades of vintage is another great way to greet summers in style. You can use a pale custard shade of yellow or a nice vintage blue to get the desired effect. ‘Theme Vintage’ complements summers perfectly so you don’t have to worry a bit about greeting your visitors this summer.

Image Via: Rudloff Custom Builders

Create Some Drama With Iron Work

The Mediterranean countries, all known for blazing, ruthless sunny days, use wrought iron in their decor. The reason is simple. Wrought iron is easy to mould into most ornamental and elaborate shapes and blends perfectly with glass and wood to create a delicate, balanced and light effect. Try using the combination of wrought iron, glass and wood into your front door and create magic in your outdoor home!

Image Via: Scottsdale Design Center

Front doors aren’t just mere entryways into your home but also a reflection of your personality and likings. It thus becomes important for your to make a statement with your front door, signaling visitors what to expect from your. If you can blend in your likes with the summery ideas that we have just mentioned, I am sure everyone is up for a visual treat. Do share any more front door decor ideas that you might have. Its always nice to read your suggestions and comments.

Click here for more Outdoor Home Ideas on Stagetecture!