You want your house to look great from the street. What happens in the backyard, where the neighbors can’t see it and the grandkids don’t care, is a different budget conversation. That tension is exactly what’s behind a trend we’re seeing all over Lakeville and the south metro right now. We’ve started calling it the Minnesota Mullet: business up front, save-the-money-for-later in the back.
It’s not a shortcut and it’s not cutting corners. It’s a real strategy, and for a lot of homeowners, it’s the smartest way to get a full exterior remodel without draining the whole project budget in one summer.
What the Minnesota Mullet actually means
The Minnesota Mullet is a front exterior remodel done first, on purpose, while the back of the house waits. New siding, new windows, a refreshed entry door and roofline on the street-facing side. The garage-side or backyard elevation, the parts only family and the dog see, stay as-is until phase two.
Homeowners aren’t doing this because they’re embarrassed about the back of the house. They’re doing it because curb appeal is where a remodel earns its keep first, and because splitting a project into phases keeps the whole thing affordable instead of putting it off another five years.
Business up front, save the money for later in the back. That’s the whole idea behind a front exterior remodel.
Why we’re seeing this so often right now in Lakeville
Material and labor costs haven’t come down, and most homeowners we talk to in Lakeville, Burnsville, Apple Valley, and Prior Lake aren’t willing to wait for that to change. So instead of shelving the whole remodel, they’re asking us to prioritize what shows.
The data backs up why the front matters most. According to Zonda’s 2025 Cost vs. Value Report, a garage door replacement returns 267.7% of its cost at resale, the highest ROI of any home improvement tracked, and vinyl siding replacement returns 96.5%. Both are front-of-house, street-visible projects. The back deck and the backyard fence just don’t move the needle the same way.
That matters more around here than people expect. A lot of Lakeville neighborhoods went up in the same stretch of years, with the same siding profiles and the same window packages on every third house. When one home updates its front elevation, it stands out on the street immediately.
Which projects belong up front
Not every project is a front-of-house project, and that’s the whole point of doing this in phases correctly. A front exterior remodel usually covers:
- Street-facing siding, especially anything visibly faded, buckled, or mismatched at the seams
- Windows on the front elevation, where old wood frames or foggy double panes are the first thing a visitor notices
- The entry door and any trim around it
- The roofline and gutters along the front slope
- A garage door refresh, which the ROI numbers above make an easy case for
Windows are where we’re seeing the most requests right now. A front-facing window replacement changes the whole look of a house from the curb in a way almost nothing else does, and it’s usually the project homeowners regret waiting on the longest.
Where the Minnesota Mullet can backfire
We’ll be straight with you, because that’s the whole point of the ClearQuote Promise. A front-only remodel done without a plan can cause real problems later. Three things are worth knowing before you start:
- Siding batches change. The vinyl or fiber cement color you install this year may not be an exact match in three years, which matters if the two elevations ever need to blend at a corner seam.
- Minnesota’s freeze-thaw cycle is harder on a south-facing wall than a north-facing one, so a front-only job can age differently than the back you’re leaving alone.
- If your front and back roofline share a slope, a partial roof replacement almost never makes sense. That one needs to happen all at once.
None of that means don’t do it. It means plan the sequence with someone who’s thought it through.
Not just someone who’s happy to sell you the front and leave phase two as a surprise.
How Kinmount plans a front exterior remodel
Every Minnesota Mullet remodel starts the same way every Kinmount project does: with an itemized ClearQuote Promise price, broken out by section of the house, so you can see exactly what the front costs on its own and what the back will run when you’re ready for it.
We’ll walk your whole exterior with you, front and back, before we ever start on phase one. That way the materials, colors, and trim details we install now are chosen to still match cleanly when we come back for the rest. Stop by our Lakeville showroom and you can see the actual siding, window, and roofing samples side by side instead of guessing from a brochure.
We also document the color, profile, and manufacturer of everything that goes on in phase one. So when you call us back in three years, nobody is standing in your driveway holding a sample up to the wall, guessing.
What a front-only remodel typically costs
Every house is different, and we’ll never quote a real number without walking your property, but a front exterior remodel in the Lakeville area generally lands in a narrower range than a full-house project because you’re touching one elevation instead of four.
| Front-of-house project | What drives the cost |
|---|---|
| Front-facing window replacement | Number of windows, frame material, glass package |
| Street-side siding | Square footage, material (vinyl, fiber cement, LP SmartSide) |
| Entry door and trim | Door material, sidelights, hardware |
| Front roofline and gutters | Roof pitch, shingle or metal choice, gutter guard system |
Because everything is itemized under the ClearQuote Promise, you’ll see each of these broken out individually rather than buried in one lump sum. That’s usually what lets a homeowner say yes to the front now and pencil in the back for next year or the year after.
Planning your own Minnesota Mullet
If you’re weighing a front exterior remodel for your own house, start with what actually bothers you when you pull into the driveway. That’s almost always the honest answer to what should happen in phase one.
From there, we’d rather sit down and look at the whole exterior with you, even the parts we’re not touching yet, so phase two isn’t a guessing game. A remodel that’s planned as one project in two phases holds up a lot better than two remodels that happened to occur on the same house.
Common questions about a front exterior remodel
Does a front-only remodel hurt resale value?
Not when it’s planned well. Appraisers and buyers respond to what they see from the street first, which is exactly why garage doors, siding, and windows post such strong ROI numbers in the Cost vs. Value data above. A front exterior remodel done with materials that can match a future back-of-house phase protects your resale value rather than working against it.
Can we finance just the front portion of a remodel?
Yes. Kinmount offers financing options sized to whatever phase you’re doing, so a front of house remodel doesn’t require the same loan as a full exterior overhaul. We’ll walk through the numbers for your specific project during your quote.
How long should we wait between phase one and phase two?
There’s no rule here. Some Lakeville homeowners come back to us the next spring, some wait several years. What matters is that we document the materials, colors, and specs from phase one so phase two matches cleanly whenever you’re ready, whether that’s for a deck in the backyard or the siding and roofline on the back of the house.
