Fall Curb Appeal in Central Maine: What Still Photographs Well in November

A bare maple isn't a dead yard. A brown lawn isn't a neglected one. November isn't the wrong month to photograph a house; it is the month most sellers decide, before the photographer has even been booked, that the house looks dead on camera.

I understand the worry. By the first week of November in Central Maine the leaves are down, the lawn has gone to straw, and the light is going early. Sunset in Waterville is 4:28 on the first of the month and 4:01 by the thirtieth, and behind a stand of pines it is dusk well before that. The light is flat, and the sky is often the color of a wool sock. If you had listed in June, the maples would have done half the work for you.

Here is what twenty-four years of listing photographs have taught me: the camera does not see what you see. You see color, or the lack of it. The camera sees lines, light, and whether anyone is taking care of the place. All three are entirely within your control in November, and none of them costs much. What follows is what I ask my sellers to do in the two weeks before a late-fall shoot, and why each one matters.

Clean lines matter more than color in a fall listing photo

Once the leaves are gone, your house is a drawing: the roofline, the trim, the edge of the driveway, the path to the door. In June a photograph is half foliage. In November it is all house, which is honestly a better advertisement for the house.

What the camera notices first is whether the lines are clean. Three jobs do most of the work:

• Get the leaves off everything, not just the lawn. The wind packs them against the foundation, into the corners of the deck, under the porch steps, and across the mulch beds. A raked lawn with leaf drifts at the foundation photographs as half-finished.
• Clean the gutters. From the street nobody can see inside them, but everybody can see what spills out of them: the dark streak down the siding and the damp line under the eaves. Buyers read that as a maintenance question before they have left the car.
• Edge the walkway and the drive. A crisp line between gravel or pavement and lawn is one of the few things that reads as tended in a brown landscape, and it takes an hour with a spade.

A brown lawn, raked and edged, looks like a lawn in November; nobody holds that against you. A lawn with leaves on it looks like nobody has been outside since September, and that, they do hold against you.

Front door curb appeal: what to do before the photographer comes

If a buyer remembers one exterior shot, it is the front door. It is also the one place a seller is tempted to pick up a paintbrush in November, and I'd ask you not to.

Every exterior paint lists a minimum application temperature on the can, along with how long the surface needs to stay above it while the paint cures. Read that label before you open the tin, and in November check the forecast for the night as well as the afternoon — a door that goes on in mild sun and then drops below the minimum overnight can blister or cure badly. If the numbers don't work, wash the door you have with warm, soapy water instead. Clean paint photographs nearly as well as new paint.

What does work, and works in an afternoon:

• Hardware. Polish or replace the handle set, the knocker, and the kick plate. Brass that has gone dull reads as tired; new matte black or polished nickel reads as current. House numbers are the same story: if yours are faded or missing a digit, replace them with something a buyer can read from the street, because that is also how they find the showing.
• The storm door. Clean the glass on both sides. Half the "dark" front doors I see are a perfectly good door behind a cloudy storm door.
• A real wreath. Balsam, not plastic. A fresh balsam wreath on a clean door is as Maine as a listing photo gets, and it photographs well through February.
• The doormat and the light fixture. A new mat, the cobwebs cleared from the fixture, and a working bulb. Small things; the camera is close enough to see them.

Winter planters: what to put in the urns once the flowers are gone

An empty urn on a front step says the season is over. A frost-blackened mum says it louder. Either take the planters away entirely or fill them with something that doesn't mind the cold.

Buy the greens from a farm stand, a garden center or a Christmas tree lot — most are open and cutting by mid-November. Clippings from your own yard work too. Do not cut on land you do not own: on private property you need the owner's say-so, and on public or conservation land it is generally not allowed at all. Three things fill a planter:

• Evergreen boughs for the body — balsam fir, white pine or cedar.
• Red-twig dogwood or birch poles for height and a line of color.
• Pinecones, winterberry or dried hydrangea tucked in at the front.

Leave the old potting soil in place, push the stems in deep, and water it once. The soil freezes around them and holds everything through the wind — the one time of year the weather does the staging for you. Keep it green and natural, with no ribbon, so the photographs still work whether the house sells in December or in March.

Lighting for winter showings in Maine

With the sun down between 4:30 and 4:00 depending on the week, most buyers will see your house for the first time in the dark, from the car, on the way home from work. The listing photographs are the other way they'll see it. Both benefit from the same four things.

• Put the porch light and any walkway lights on a timer, lit from four o'clock until bedtime, every day, whether or not a showing is booked. Buyers drive by unannounced; I'd rather the house look occupied and warm when they do.
• Use warm bulbs, the ones labeled 2700K, in every exterior fixture. Daylight-blue bulbs make clapboard look gray and snow look like concrete.
• Replace any burned-out bulb on the garage, the barn, and the shed. One dark fixture on a lit house is exactly where the eye goes.
• Ask about a twilight exterior. Shot in the twenty minutes or so after sunset, with every interior light on and the porch lit, the windows glow, the sky still holds some blue, and bare trees read as silhouette rather than clutter. It is not a fit for every house: it works best on a home with plenty of windows facing the camera, and it needs a clear evening and a photographer who has planned for that narrow window, often as a paid add-on. On a house set deep in trees or with few front windows it is rarely worth the money. Ask me whether yours is a candidate before you book it.

What the fallen leaves expose in your yard

This is the part of November nobody warns you about. From May to October the trees hid things: the neighbor's camper, your woodpile, the boat on the trailer, the shed that needs a door, the blue tarp over the thing you've been meaning to deal with. In November they are all in the photograph, and they are all in the buyer's windshield.

Walk out to the road, turn around, and look at the house the way a stranger would. Then:

• Stack the wood. A straight, covered woodpile is one of the few pieces of yard clutter that photographs as a feature in Maine; it says the house is ready for winter and somebody competent lives here. A sprawl of split wood under a tarp says the opposite.
• Lose the blue tarps. Whatever is under them, either move it, cover it with something dark and fitted, or leave it uncovered. A blue tarp is the one thing I can promise you a buyer will notice and remember.
• Move or cover the boat, the camper, and the trailer, or at least move them out of the line between the road and the front door. If the neighbor's is in the shot, we'll choose an angle; that is my job, not a conversation I'd ask you to have over the fence.
• Put a door on the shed, or at least close it. An open outbuilding photographs as a question.

The leaves coming down also gives you something. If there is water anywhere near your property, this is the month it shows. A seasonal camp on China Lake has a better view of the water in November than it does in July, and a house on a rise in Sidney or Vassalboro often picks up a view it didn't have in August. Clean the windows on that side, inside and out, and we'll photograph the view while it's open.

Snow, holiday decorations, and the projects to leave until spring

If it snows before the shoot, don't panic and don't reschedule; an inch of fresh snow on a brown lawn is the best lawn you'll have until May. Shovel the full width of the walkway and the drive, clear the steps completely, and sand them. A half-shoveled path photographs as a hazard, and at a showing it is one. Snow before mid-November isn't unusual around here, and neither is a bare December; plan for either.

Holiday decorations are a timing question, not a taste question. Listing photographs live on the internet for as long as the house is on the market, and a house photographed with lights on the railing in November looks stale to the buyer scrolling in February. Keep the décor out of the photographs. If you want it up for showings, keep it simple: the balsam wreath, white lights, nothing inflatable, nothing that blinks. Take it down the first week of January.

What to skip entirely in November:

• Planting anything. It won't establish, and a new shrub with frozen roots is a dead shrub in a March photo.
• Laying sod or seeding. Same reason.
• Painting, as above.
• Power-washing the siding. Water in the clapboard joints the night before a hard freeze is how siding gets damaged; a hose and a soft brush on a mild afternoon is enough.
• Pruning the lilacs. They have already set next spring's buds, and cutting them now costs you the May flowers a buyer would see at the second showing.

Every one of those is a spring job. Spend the November afternoons on the lists above instead; the return is better, and nothing has to be undone.

Who buys a house in Maine in November

Every listing I take starts with one question: who is the most likely buyer of this home? In November the pool is smaller than it is in May, and in my experience that works in a seller's favor. The buyers I meet at this time of year tend to be moving for a reason rather than browsing — a job starting in January, an estate to settle, a change that would not wait for spring. I cannot tell you that is true of every buyer who walks through your door. What I can tell you is that they have fewer houses to choose from, and that a late-fall buyer in Maine is usually asking something a June buyer never thinks about: does this house handle winter?

A clean roofline, a lit door, a stacked woodpile, and a cleared path answer that question before they've opened the listing. That is what curb appeal means in November. It isn't about pretending it's June; it's about showing that the house is ready for what's coming.

If you are thinking about a spring listing, this is still the month to talk — though not to bank photographs. Your listing photos should show buyers the house they will actually walk up to, so an April listing wants April pictures. The reason to talk now is the work: which projects are worth doing before you list, which ones I would talk you out of, and which ones have to be lined up over the winter so they are finished before the photographer arrives. Those are decisions you cannot make in April. I'd rather talk to you six months earlier, than two weeks too late.

Email me at rachel@centralmainehomes.com, or call or text 207-649-2156.

Thank you,

Rachel Anderson
Broker, Realtor®
Coldwell Banker Plourde Real Estate · 143 Silver St., Waterville, ME 04901