How Home Landscape Design Affects the Real Estate Value

Home landscaping is simply, transforming, rearranging, and improving the curb appeal features of the grounds around your home into a more pleasant piece of property from the aesthetic standpoint and for practical use. For example, the garden should have plants or grasses; or the big tree in your backyard needs to be trimmed; or planting complementary foundation plants along the foundation of the house. These decisions can provide a big boost on the value of your real estate. This is especially useful if you plan to list your home for sale.

A neat, attractive home landscape design can increase the value of the home by as much as 15%. So if you have a $300,000 piece of real estate, you've just earned another $45,000 by just adding well designed landscaping. The increased value of your home will not be seen until you decide to place it on the market. The viability of your home does not only lie on the home itself but on the taste of the potential buyers. In other words, an overly personalized home landscape can be expensive but not really viable compared to simple yet attractive design.  The more detailed the landscape, the more work involved in maintaining it.

It is, therefore, important to make sure that you know what type of home landscaping design is more appealing to homebuyers in a span of years so that you keep the value of your home up and at the same time, you attract homebuyers whenever you do decide to sell it.  

English: Part of a landscape and design project by M. D. Vaden of Oregon, in Beaverton, Oregon, with a tree, shrubs, ground covers and ornamental grasses (including blue fescue, Japanese snowbell tree and Nandina domestica 'Gulf Stream'. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Take note of the following tips to learn the best home landscaping designs for the market:

•  Internet, books, magazines, and television shows provide great information about the kinds of landscaping designs that are currently selling.
• Observe home landscapes of other homes in similar neighborhoods. Don’t over landscape for your neighborhood.
• Seek professional help from people in the landscape design business. Hiring a landscape architect for a do-it-yourself landscape design can be well worth the hourly fee.
• If you don’t want to hire professionals, then research and read articles on the basics of landscape design.
• Ask your real estate agent what is normal landscape for your pricing range and what are the latest gardening trends on home design.

You may have followed these tips but you cannot fully guarantee that your landscape design will help your home sell. Take note that your potential buyers seek other factors other than design:

• Special elements, such as waterfalls, fountains, and artificial ponds are some of the most sought after landscape elements that buyers look for. It is surely an attention grabber.
• Low maintenance home landscape design. Different buyers will have different tastes when it comes to the design, but they will surely look for one thing: a low maintenance home landscape design.
• Year-round visual interests. Shrubs, evergreens and other plants that grow all year round are great addition to your garden since buyers usually look for homes that grow plants that never fade during the winter.

Selling your home must start from the outside with curb appeal. That is why it is very important that you have a good landscape design to increase not only the value of your home, but also the viability of it. 

How Home Landscape Design Affects the Real Estate Value by Greenwood Nursery.

8 Gardening Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Do you realize that gardening mistakes happen right in your front yard? Whether you think that your garden looks good or not, if everything doesn't work together, the entire garden doesn’t work. Let’s talk about the most common gardening mistakes and how to fix them.

Lawn&Garden (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. Grass is not greener. This ranks number 1. Why? Most gardens and yards have lawn, but one may be slightly greener than the other. If your lawn looks browner than the soil underneath, it is time to reassess your watering, fertilizing and mowing schedule. Think where you may have gone wrong and make the necessary lawn care adjustments. Tired of lawn care? Consider other lawn substitute options such as ground covers such as periwinkle. Visit Greenwood Nursery for more on lawn substitutes.

2. Tools and clutter are everywhere. They may be useful objects, but if they are just stacked in your garage or tossed in a box, then you think they are not worth the storage. At that point, they don't just look like junk; they are junk. Sort through them one by one and determine whether you want to keep them or not. Your criteria when deciding if they deserve the trip to dump or not is simple: Ask yourself, do you specific plans for them?

3. Your house and garden can be seen from the road. There are several short- and long-term solutions to using plants to create privacy. One quick-fix solution is to build a concrete wall that would separate your garden from the sidewalk view. For a longer, much appealing look, planting fast growing shrubs is a good idea.

4. Weed invasion. Keeping your lawn regularly maintained can solve weed problems. Do a regular walk through to check for weeds about twice a week during the growing season. Dig the weeds out by hand to keep them from re-growing by seeding the empty areas of your lawn.

5. Limited space. If your problem is space, then here's one idea that can definitely help you maximize every square inch of your garden: think vertical gardens. With vertical gardening, you can create a sense of lush greenery by using wall space, arbors and trellises to allow plants to climb upwards.

6. Where's your house? If shrubs have swallowed your house, then hedge clippers comes in handy. You don’t want plants blocking the way from your drive to the front door so some serious pruning may be in order. You want landscaping, not a house in the middle of the forest. Also, tall and over grown shrubs are a security hazard providing a burglar with the protection and opportunity that they would need to break into your home. It's time to select curb appeal plants.

7. Selection and winter care. Some garden plants will not survive winter temperatures without proper care. When planning your garden, be sure to select the majority of your plant that will grow year round and always include a few evergreens and plants with winter interest. In fall be sure to provide your garden plants with a good thick layer (approximately 3 inches) of shredded bark mulch to insulate and provide moisture over the winter months.

8. Fences are falling apart. Fences are not just to separate your property from your neighbor's. They also add to the overall look of your garden. Make sure that you maintain your fences like the way you keep your plants. Use fences as backdrops for your landscaping projects.

8 Gardening Mistakes and How to Correct Them by Greenwood Nursery