1960s and 70s Ranch House Exterior Remodels: Before and After

From the late 1940s through the 1970s, more single-family homes were built in the ranch style than any other, mostly in postwar suburban tracts where the priority was getting families into a usable footprint as quickly and cheaply as possible. The houses themselves followed: long, low, generous on floor plan, light on facade detail. The architecture was meant to disappear into the lot, not announce itself.

Five decades later, that's exactly what dates them. The strong silhouette is still strong. The skin almost never is. What you're looking at on most 1960s or 1970s ranch homes is original siding, brick, doors, and trim that have aged out of their decade, often patched with mismatched updates from the eighties and nineties. None of that is structural. It's a surface problem. Surface problems are budgets, not surprises.

The six before-and-after exterior remodels below are organized around the five decisions that matter most on a ranch house remodel: what to do about the brick, how to choose a color, when to recommit to paint versus reclad, how to unify a facade that's been touched up in pieces, and how to seat the house back into its landscape.

The brick problem on most 1960s ranch homes

Almost every ranch from this era has a brick element doing the wrong job. Sometimes it's a red brick wainscot running along the bottom third of the facade. Sometimes it's a chimney clad in the same red brick that no longer matches anything else on the house. Sometimes it's both. Whatever the configuration, the brick was originally selected to add warmth and texture to a tract house with a small material budget. By now, that warmth has cooled into a hard orange-red that pulls the eye exactly where you don't want it.

Soften the brick without erasing it

A limewash treatment thins out the saturation and lets the original variation show through. It runs roughly $1.50 to $3 per square foot for materials, and most homeowners can supervise the work over a weekend with a contractor handling prep and trim.

In the picture above, limewashed brick is paired with vertical cedar tongue and groove and a sage green door. The brick is still doing work, just quietly now. This kind of partial intervention is the right call when the brick has real material character worth keeping and the rest of the facade just needs to stop competing with it.

Paint it out completely

This is the full commitment: a single saturated color across brick, siding, and trim that erases the material distinction and lets the silhouette of the house do the talking. Painting brick runs $1 to $3 per square foot installed, depending on prep and the number of coats. Once it's painted, it stays painted. Sandblasting it back off is expensive enough that the decision is functionally permanent.

Coordinate everything else around the brick

This is the move for ranches with a stone chimney or higher-quality brickwork worth preserving, and it usually means choosing siding and trim colors that pull the same earth tones as the masonry. Most design-dependent of the three, and the easiest to get wrong. On the right house, that risk pays off in original character.

Color choices for a 1960s or 1970s ranch house exterior remodel

The original color choice on a 1960s or 1970s ranch was usually a pale beige, soft yellow, or non-color green, picked to feel friendly on a tract street. Those colors haven't aged into anything. They've just gotten dustier.

The fix isn't a "modern" color. It's a confident one. Saturated paint pulls a long, low silhouette together and gives the eye an obvious place to rest. Pale and muddy colors do the opposite: they let the facade dissolve into the sky on overcast days and into the lawn on bright ones.

The before-and-after above is the cleanest demonstration. The original house has pale green siding, a red brick band along the bottom, and a roofline that fades into a gray Pacific Northwest sky. Three colors that don't talk to each other. Three textures that don't either. The remodel sets everything to a deep charcoal and runs basalt steppers through the lawn to a natural wood door. The long, low silhouette suddenly looks like a deliberate architectural choice instead of a budget compromise. A typical full-exterior repaint on a ranch this size runs $4,000 to $10,000 and takes five to seven days of contractor time, depending on prep and square footage.

Confidence works in saturated color too, not just dark.

Soft yellow vinyl siding on a smaller ranch disappears into an overcast fall sky. The same house painted deep navy holds the lot, with white trim sharpening every opening and a red door as the only warm note. A low stone retaining wall and structured planting replace the bare foundation. A foundation left raw against a saturated color looks unfinished.

Trim that doesn't stand out goes muddy. Original aluminum windows next to fresh paint look like exactly what they are. Plan the package: siding, trim, foundation, window hardware. The siding color is the loudest move. The rest keeps it from looking cheap.

When to repaint and when to reclad on a ranch exterior remodel

Before you pick a paint chip, check what's under the existing siding. The repaint-or-reclad call is mostly a diagnostic question, not a design one.

Diagnose what's under the existing siding

Vinyl siding stays vinyl siding regardless of color. It can be painted. Five to seven years later, chipping starts at every cut edge. Aluminum siding takes paint better. The dents from forty years of weather show through any color anyway. Original wood siding takes paint best, if the boards are sound and the moisture flashing hasn't failed. Board-and-batten that's started to delaminate is past paint. Once water has gotten behind the trim strips, the boards underneath are gone.

What full recladding actually looks like

The before-and-after above is what happens when the facade is past paint. The original is chalky white board-and-batten with an exposed brick chimney and a tired stained door. The skin is fighting the architecture and losing. The remodel runs full vertical cedar slat siding across the elevation, clads the chimney in stucco, swaps windows to thin black frames, and puts a tall blond wood slab where the door was. The bushes and driveway didn't move.

Vertical cedar siding on a full elevation runs $15,000 to $40,000 depending on linear feet, prep, and whether the underlayment needs replacing. That's a real renovation, not a cosmetic refresh. It also forces a contractor decision. The team that paints exteriors is rarely the same team that hangs cladding correctly. A scope review before signing helps catch line items that get missed when those two trades blur together, like trim transitions at corners, eaves, and around the chimney.

The repaint vs reclad rule

If the existing siding is sound and the underlayment is dry, paint. If you're losing boards, fighting moisture, or trying to change the actual character of the house, reclad. The middle ground (paint over compromised siding) is where most ranch remodels go wrong.

The chopped-up facade is the most common 1960s ranch remodel problem

Most 1960s ranch homes haven't been left alone for fifty years. They've been touched up in pieces. The original windows got swapped for vinyl in the eighties. The aluminum garage door went in around 1992. Somebody added a wood door in 2008. Trim got painted three different times in three different whites. The result is a facade running four or five competing materials across one elevation, none of which were meant to work together.

It's also the one that gets misdiagnosed most often. Homeowners look at the facade and assume it needs a redesign. It usually doesn't. It needs unification. That's a cheaper problem to solve.

The picture above shows a facade that started with red brick, beige vinyl siding, a rusted white aluminum garage door, white aluminum trim, and a wrought-iron porch column. Five materials, four colors, no relationship between any of them. The remodel paints the brick, siding, and soffit in coordinated dark tones, replaces the aluminum garage door with a frosted glass and matte black one, swaps the wrought iron for square columns, and runs recessed lighting under the eaves to pick up the new black trim. The floor plan, the roofline, and most of the windows didn't move.

When a renovation budget is tight, painting brick and siding in the same family is the closest thing to free architecture. The new garage door is the bigger ticket on a project like this, with modern aluminum and glass doors typically running $2,500 to $5,000 installed. That's the right place to spend, because the garage door on a ranch is often forty percent of the elevation.

The diagnostic for a chopped-up facade is straightforward: stand across the street and count the materials and colors visible from the curb. If the answer is more than three of either, the problem isn't design. It's coordination.

Earth-tone palettes for a ranch style exterior remodel

The original siting logic of a ranch house is still there, even if nobody's thought about it in fifty years. These houses were designed to sit low on the lot and disappear into whatever was around them. Depending on the lot, that meant scrub and oaks in California, pines in Texas, native planting almost everywhere.

What dates a ranch from the curb is often the color choice that broke that logic. White, baby blue, soft yellow, mint green: all friendly, none of them connected to the lot the house was built on. Earth tones reinstate the original siting intent and let the house settle back into its landscape.

The picture above shows what that looks like when the lot still has its bones. Faded sky-blue siding fights the stone chimney, which is the best original feature on the house. The remodel pulls the siding to a deep forest green that sits in the same family as the limestone and the surrounding pines. Trim goes oxblood. New tile pavers in blue-and-green pick up colors from both.

The principle: pick a color that already exists on the lot, in materials or landscape that have been there longer than the house. Choosing a "natural" color that isn't natural to the actual lot (coastal blue in central Texas) is the wrong move.

Remodel your ranch home with guidance from Block Renovation

1960s and 1970s ranch homes are distinct from other houses. The brick problems, the siding traps, and the layered-up facade conditions are ranch-specific and require contractors familiar with such intricacies. Thankfully, Block Renovation and its contractors know ranch homes. Other articles that could help with your transformation?

• Ranch home additions: ideas, costs, and what to expect
• 1960s ranch home interiors before and afters
• Adding a front porch to a ranch home: before and after
• Ranch home remodeling ideas to inspire your next renovation

When you're ready, Block matches your project with vetted local contractors who bid competitively against an expert-reviewed scope, so you're choosing between real numbers.