Giving your home a face lift can be easier than you think. Start outside and look at your front door and yard. Clean your driveway and repair any cracks. Trim any scraggly bushes and remove any dead ones. Remove weeds and create a landscape bed or beds to give your plantings more emphasis and interest. If your landscape bed is sparse, add a tree, or bushes and plantings in groupings of threes for impact. Place the grouping of three close together in a triangular pattern. To get the best price on plantings, wait until fall, when they are on sale to purchase them. Fall is also a great season to plant because the plants will usually go dormant over the winter months. Wash your exterior, if needed, and repaint or stain any worn fencing. And in the backyard, try to create an outdoor living space to expand your home’s living quarters and value.

Replace, paint or polish outdoor light fixtures, mailboxes and house numbers that look worn. Give battered front doors a fresh coat of paint or stain and replace worn out screen doors completely.

Scrape and repaint worn house exteriors, including window frames and sills, door stoops, and any other exterior wood surfaces. Caulk wooden windows and replace any broken panes. Wash windows on the exterior and replace or repair broken storm windows.

Inside the house, replace worn out carpet, or pull up old carpet if nice wood floors are hiding underneath. If your carpet is in good shape, but just has a stain that can’t be cleaned, replace just that section with another remnant of that same carpet. Replace worn out or outdated linoleum floors by laying down a new sheet of linoleum or separate squares on the floor.

Repair small holes in your drywall with drywall compound and repair larger holes using a mesh screen to hold the drywall compound in place. Repaint or wallpaper walls with updated colors or patterns. If your walls are uneven, try painting with a darker color, texturing the walls, faux finishing or wallpapering to disguise the problem. If you decide to wallpaper a wall that’s out of plumb, choose wallpaper that doesn’t have an exact pattern that needs to match up at the seams or the problem will be more obvious. For uneven windows and doors, paint the trim a color similar to the wall color to minimize the problem.

Add baseboard trim or other architectural details to add interest to your walls and to add richness to a dining room, add painted chair rail and boards in a pattern that gives the appearance of expensive painted paneling on the bottom half of your walls.

Take a lint free rag and touch up stained woodwork or give painted woodwork a fresh coat of paint. If the woodwork is too dark for the house, outdated or worn out, painting is always a great alternative because paint gives a clean new appearance to your house.

Paint small rooms a lighter color to make them seem larger and don’t use many colors throughout the room. If you have a pattern in the room, keep the pattern small and simple. And if your whole house is small, painting all the rooms the same color will make the house seem larger. Keep the floors all the same material to give the appearance of more space too.

If you have a room that’s long and narrow, use a darker color on the farther walls to bring the walls closer together. And try not to place much furniture on the longer walls because the room will become narrow again. Have the floor rug or covering in a pattern that draws your eye across the narrow part of the room to widen the appearance of your room also.

If the room is too dark, paint in a lighter shade of a warmer color and keep the ceiling color white or very light. And for high ceilings, paint in a darker color to lower its appearance, and to give height to a lower ceiling, paint in a white or light shade. Another way to give height to your ceiling is to place bold patterned or vertical striped curtains on your windows that extend almost to the ceiling and draw your eye up. Placing your accessory pillows on their corners adds height to your room also, along with using tall furnishings.

For ceilings, repair stains by using a kilz type paint to cover up and then paint over the kilz type paint with the ceiling color.

For the kitchen replace, reface or paint your kitchen cabinets, depending on your budget. If you have a larger budget, then you can replace the kitchen cabinets and start completely over to create a beautiful new kitchen. But, if you don’t want to have that much expense, a great alternative is having your kitchen cabinets refaced. With refacing, you replace only the doors and drawer fronts with new wood and hardware to give the appearance of new cabinets. Kitchen cabinets can also be repainted and the hardware replaced, if you have little or no budget. Remove old or dated appliances and replace old kitchen countertops, if possible.

Replace worn out light fixtures throughout the house, especially on the outside of the house and the entry where they have the most impact. Keep all the light fixtures and hardware in either all warm tones or all cool tones, if possible, to unify the house. Try to keep the style of the fixtures throughout the house similar. For example, if you have a simple modern silver light fixture in the entryway, normally, you don’t want to have a traditional weathered gold elaborate fixture in the adjoining dining room. There are always exceptions to the rules, but use this guideline to help you in narrowing down your choices.

For the bathroom, touch up any worn porcelain areas and replace mildewed or damaged caulk between tiles. Replace worn out flooring, outdated or worn cabinet knobs and plumbing fixtures. Touch up any stained cabinets that are worn and repaint cabinets with missing paint. Add beautiful fabric curtains over plastic shower curtains to give a luxurious feel and replace outdated mirrors over the sink. If you don’t have the funds to replace a mirror, then try repainting the wood frame to give it a fresh new look.

With window treatments, pull down any dated, worn or faded window treatments, including old window sheers. Replace outdated or broken blinds and shades. Try to keep the same type of blind or shade in each window on the front of your house to create a unified cohesive look and wash the interior of the windows to make them sparkle. Repair damaged window sills, then repaint or stain them to give a fresh look.

If your windows need to appear taller, hang your curtains close to the ceiling to give the appearance of added height. And if your windows need to appear wider, extend your curtain material horizontally past the edge of your window onto the wall to add width.

Use mirrors throughout the house to increase the perception of space. The mirrors will bounce off light from outside and reflect it throughout the rooms. Try to place the mirrors so they face a window to create an outside view or another room that’s larger for the most impact and reflection.

If the house feels too cramped, knock out an interior wall that’s not a support wall and open up the space. Then add storage in the garage or basement and get any clutter off the floors and into storage or elsewhere.

Designer’s Eye column was written by Karen Mills of Interiors by Design, Inc. and host, Living Large.