Curb appeal in Canada: a season-by-season checklist
The first photo anyone sees of your listing is the front of the house. Buyers flick through fifty listings on a couch after dinner, and the exterior shot decides whether yours gets a second tap. Here is the part that should make you feel better: most of what makes a front yard photograph badly is stuff, not structure. Stuff can be moved on a Saturday.
This is the list we work through, season by season. None of it needs a contractor.
Spring
Snow leaves, and everything it was hiding shows up at once.
Rake out the flattened grey grass and the sand the plow left. Pull last fall's leaves out of the beds. Cut the first edge of the season along the walkway, a crisp line there does more for a photo than new plants. Sweep the winter grit off the porch and knock the cobwebs out of the light fixtures. If the front door paint has gone chalky, this is the one paint job to take on: one door, one afternoon, one can.
Put the shovels, the ice melter, and the winter mat in the garage. Buyers in May do not want to think about February.
Summer
Summer is maintenance, not projects.
Mow two days before photos, not the morning of, so the lawn does not look freshly scalped. Water the beds the night before so the soil reads dark. Coil the hose or hide it entirely. Wheel the bins out of frame, behind the fence or into the garage. Move the cars off the driveway and down the street. An empty driveway makes every house look wider.
Two planters by the door beat ten scattered around the yard. Full ones. A dead planter is worse than none.
Fall
The window between full trees and bare branches is short in most of Canada, and it is the best light of the year. If you can time your photos, time them for it.
Leaves off the walkway and the porch, even if the lawn still has some. Clear the eavestroughs you can see from the street, a sagging line of leaves over the door shows up in photos more than you would think. Pumpkins are fine. Twelve pumpkins are a lot.
Winter
You cannot fight winter, so make it look handled.
Shovel to bare pavement the full width of the walk, not one shovel wide. Salt stains sweep off the porch with a stiff brush. Shoot in daylight, late morning if you can, because a winter dusk photo reads as gloomy no matter how nice the house is. If the listing can wait for a fresh snowfall instead of week-old grey snow, wait. Fresh snow photographs like a postcard.
What to skip
New interlock, a fence, a big landscaping project. If the job needs a contractor and the sign goes up in six weeks, skip it. You will spend the last week of it stressed, and the photos mostly will not show the difference. Spend the weekend and the hundred dollars on the list above instead.
If you would rather not decide what matters
Plenty of sellers work this list themselves and it goes fine. The hard part is not the jobs, it is judging your own frontage after living behind it for years. You stop seeing the hedge.
A stager walks the front once and names the four things that matter, which is a shorter list than this page because it is about your house instead of every house. We keep a directory of Canadian staging companies you can search by city, including Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, or browse every city.
Once you are back indoors, the same walkthrough is the room-by-room staging checklist.
Weighing the options
Keep reading
For sellers
The home staging checklist, room by room
Every room in the house, in the order to do them: what to remove, what to rearrange, and what a photo actually notices.
For sellers
What to fix before selling your house (and what to skip)
The repairs buyers notice first, and the projects you should not start six weeks before listing.
For sellers
How to declutter before selling, without the panic
A calm order of operations for thinning out a house before listing: what goes first, where it goes, and how far is far enough.
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