Whether you’ve got a mess outside your home that you’re needing to clean up or you’re simply ready for a new look, landscaping around your property can be a hard yet beautiful task. However, if it’s fine incorrectly or without the right considerations in mind, you could wind up doing more harm than good, both for your property value and for the integrity of your yard.
To help you avoid both of these issues, here are three things to consider when landscaping around your home.
Do Hardscaping First
The order in which you take care of landscaping tasks is very important. If you complete the wrong tasks first, you could end up having to redo all that work after your next tasks negate or undo the previous tasks that you thought you’d taken care of.
Ideally, Charlie Thigpen, a contributor to the DIY Network, recommends that you take care of all your hardscaping first. What this means is that if you’re wanting to put in a path or rocks or a deck or anything that’s made of harder materials, that should all be set prior to working with your vegetation. This will ensure that you don’t ruin your grass or other plants by creating hardscaping over top of them. And, because hardscaping is more difficult to move, setting this up first will help you see where you can put vegetation and what areas you should keep clear.
Protecting And Complementing Your Home
Just because something might seem like a beautiful piece to add to your landscaping right now doesn’t mean that it will always be the right choice for you. In fact, with things like trees or shrubs, you’ll want to be sure that you get the right kind and that you plant them in the right place so they don’t wind up messing with the foundation of your home.
When picking a landscaping design for longevity, Laura Fisher Kaiser, a contributor to HGTV, recommends that you design something that’s going to be complementary to the structure of your home. So if your home has a lot of sharp angles, your landscaping should, too. And if the look of your home is very whimsical, you might want to showcase this style in the landscaping as well.
Which Way Your Home Faces
Before you plant anything in your yard or get too far into your landscaping design, Larry Bilotti, a contributor to BobVila.com, advises that you consider the orientation of your home with regards to the sun. If your home faces east or west, you should set up your landscaping understanding that you’ll be getting a lot of direct sunlight during certain parts of the day. But if your home faces north, you may want to plan things that need less sunlight.
To help make your home’s landscaping all that you’ve dreamed it could be, make sure you consider the variables mentioned above before creating your landscape design.
