Homeowners improve their landscaping for curb appeal for a number of reasons. Sometimes you’re attempting to make a home more visually stimulating for selling. Other times, you’re just trying to stand out in your neighborhood. Either way, making changes to your front landscape can drastically increase its marketability and enhance your home’s beauty.
Solutions vary from small improvements to drastic changes. With proper planning, research, and a careful execution, you can transform the front of your home. Here are some things to consider when planning your curb appeal improvements:
Plants should enhance your home’s beauty, not hide it
Often trees and shrubs outgrow their space or were planted in the wrong location. They grow to hide windows, doorways, or over walkways. Trees can be pushing against the home, or drooping into shrubs below, often even hiding these shrubs. Pruning these plants can sometimes gain more visibility of your home. However, its possible they may need to be removed completely and replaced with better plant choices.
Plants should display a variety of features
A good base of evergreen shrubs distributed evenly throughout the landscape is a good idea because they will keep their color when leaves drop off of other plants in the winter. However, this shouldn’t be the only type of plant in your landscape. Even within that group of evergreens, use different textures and colors. There are multiple species of evergreen shrubs with needles or leaves that can give you season-long greenery. A good landscape designer knows how to add-in flowering shrubs and perennials for season-long interest alongside of those evergreen shrubs. By using plants of different heights, a designer can create layers of plants with the tallest in back, that display from every visual angle.
Hardscaping can provide excellent accents
Something as simple as adding edgestone or small retaining walls to beds can help compliment the colors of your home and connect it visually to the home.
Hard surfaces should be clean and updated
Have an old broken, cracked concrete sidewalk? Sure, replacing with concrete is the cheapest option, but for added durability and a class above, try using other materials to replace these walkways and even front porches. A landscape company that installs walks and patios can remove these old concrete surfaces and replace with inter-locking paver and block products that also update and accent your home’s beauty.
Enjoy your landscape 24 hours a day
Landscape lighting can help to light pathways, add light accents on architectural elements of your structure, and to also up-light specimen trees.
Incorporating all or some of these elements can be a task that should usually be left up to the guidance of a professional. If you need help performing and planning your curb-appeal make-over, consult a local landscape design and installation company.