How I Kick-Started My Pricey Home Improvement Project Using This Free AI Tool—That Will Save Me a Bundle

One of the hardest parts of overhauling your home’s exterior is powering through the decision paralysis that can come with choosing things like paint color, siding material, or window style. Wading through hundreds (thousands?) of options and confidently picking a winner—despite not knowing what the finished product will look like—can seem like a herculean task.

A crystal ball would be great in this situation.

As a relatively new homeowner, I’ve dreamed plenty about redoing the outside of our house. Last year, my husband and I purchased a 1925 Craftsman in the Pacific Northwest. Despite its many benefits (including a spacious great room, vaulted ceilings, recently renovated kitchen, quartz countertops, and original brick chimney), other elements could use fixing—primarily the peeling exterior paint and missing shingles.

Even before submitting our offer, we knew a big-budget project to boost our curb appeal was imminent.

So you can imagine how excited I was to learn about the Realtor.com® Renovation Designer, an AI design tool that generates a realistic image of your home’s exterior, post-renovation, with actual materials and colors.

For homeowners who want to overhaul their exterior but don’t have much design acumen (and have trouble making decisions), Renovation Designer is a great starting point. Plus, it’s fun to play with. It might not be a crystal ball, but it kind of seems like the next best thing.

Using Renovation Designer to experiment with the appearance of your home is shockingly easy. To get started, you navigate to the My Home section of Realtor.com, claim your home, click on the Renovations tab, and upload a photo of your house’s exterior.

I used a listing photo of another home for sale in Seattle that looks quite similar to my 1925 Craftsman. (For privacy reasons, I chose not to put my home on display here.) From there, you can select from a wide range of design options—from paint colors to roof options—and see a fairly accurate visualization of your house in real time with high-quality photos.

Let’s take a closer look at how Renovation Designer can help kick-start your next home project. Here’s what I observed.

You can try on actual paint colors from top brands

A fresh coat of paint to your exterior instantly boosts curb appeal. But selecting a single paint color or even an entire palette can be overwhelming. Renovation Designer presents you with hundreds of paint colors from top brands, so you can try on as many shades as you’d like.

Right now, my house is a classic shade of blue, but I’ve thought about dabbling in the dark exterior trend. Using Renovation Designer, I tested paint colors such as Wenge by Benjamin Moore, a rich shade of dark brown, and Pitch Black by Farrow & Ball, a modern, moody hue.

Of course, I had to have a bit of fun and see what our house would look like adorned in Love Poem by Behr, an exuberant shade of purplish pink.

When you’re done playing, you can note your preferred paint colors and head to your local home improvement store to pick up samples.

Test out dozens of design styles

We have a classic Craftsman home, but we’ve always appreciated midcentury modern design. Renovation Designer allows us to see what our Craftsman would look like if our future renovation included quintessential midcentury touches like floor-to-ceiling windows or board-and-batten siding.

All you have to do is upload a picture of your exterior, and within a few seconds, the AI tool produces high-quality visualizations of your home in popular design styles like farmhouse, contemporary, and Mediterranean.

Scroll through a variety of pre-selected design styles, and compare them with your home’s current appearance. From there, you can bring your ideas to your contractor or design professional who will help bring your dream to life.

Get real about your budget

Renovating your home exterior requires a healthy budget, but the net total can vary depending on your chosen materials and products. For example, stone veneer siding, plus labor, costs the average homeowner about $13 to $22 per square foot, whereas board and batten costs between $2.50 and $12.50 to install, including materials and labor, according to Angi.

Once you’ve sampled different siding, roofing, and window options in Renovation Designer, you can price out your favorite looks and set a realistic budget for your upcoming project.

As I mentioned above, we will need to redo some of our siding in the near future. Right now, we have beautiful (but old) cedar shingle siding, and replacing it would cost a pretty penny. (Angi estimates cedar shingle siding costs between $7 and $11 per square foot.)

But horizontal lap siding, especially vinyl versions, are less expensive. I can use Renovation Designer to see if horizontal lap siding suits our house’s architecture and the surrounding environment, and then consider that information when choosing materials for our renovation.