As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for Home and Lifestyle / Renovating and DIY

Landscaping adds value to your home and gives you extra living space

by

I’ve noticed lately that the value of homes in our area has been going up and up. We’ve only lived in our house for six years and already and going by the price similar homes in our area have sold for, our house has gone up in price by more than $250,000 making homes in our area $450K +.

Don’t be fooled. There’s nothing particularly special about the homes in our area. It’s a nice neighborhood, but it’s not a gated community or anything. Housing prices have just been going up.

The odd thing is, I find many of the homes rather plain Jane. For all I know they’ve been gutted and completely renovated inside, but from the outside they don’t look like anything special.

That’s where we are different. We are renovating the inside of our home, but we began our indoor renovations at the same time as our outdoor landscaping. Luckily we finished the outdoor landscaping the same year we started. The indoor renovations are ongoing much to my dismay.

We have no plans to sell our home, but I’ve always figured that all the work we’ve done landscaping our yard and caring for our lovely garden has added value to our home.

My suspicions were confirmed when I read an article on Plant-Care.com that states that a study cited in Smart Money magazine states that consumers value a landscaped home up to 11.3% higher than it’s base price. I’m pleased with that report since our home is the only one on the whole block that really has any landscaping. We’ve added value to our home. It’s confirmed!

The article that I found that information in was one that discussed a number of unique backyard landscape ideas. If you’ve considered landscaping your front and or backyard and would like some great ideas you should go read the article. There are links within the article that lead to other articles with more in depth information about each particular type of landscaping discussed within the main article.

We don’t have a pool and we never will because our backyard is just too small to have a pool, but if you’ve thought of putting a pool in your yard or perhaps have one, but haven’t done much else to the yard you should read the section on pool and landscaping around the pool area. Certainly if you’ve watched any of the programs on TLC you know that you can landscape a pool area in many different styles and your yard could go from a recreation area to a true living area with a little landscaping.

As many of you know our landscaped backyard includes raised garden beds along the perimeter of the yard and a lovely patio for entertaining. There are some great deck and patio landscaping ideas discussed in the above mentioned article. If you’ve thought of putting in a patio or deck, but you aren’t sure where to start or what materials to use you’ll get some great starter suggestions by reading the articles linked to the landscaping write up.

Some simple, and economical ways to landscape your yard, whether you already have a fully landscaped backyard or just a flowerbed or two is to add some garden lighting. Outdoor lighting, electric or solar, can be used to light a garden path or highlight plants or other features with a garden or backyard. We use solar outdoor lighting and it makes our yard look quite lovely at night. It also makes it pleasant to sit outdoors in the evening in the dimly lit garden.

We used interlocking easy stone to create our raised garden beds, but we could have used layered rocks, or we could have brought in some larger rocks and made landscape features out of them. The above mentioned article discusses the use of rocks in the landscape and how to create a natural look using rocks.

One thing that my husband in particular wants to add to our garden is landscape speakers. There are some speakers that are made to look like rocks that you can place within your garden and hook up to your indoor stereo system which would allow you to have music in your yard yet maintain a natural look and feel. I’m pretty sure that, that is one of the ideas that we’ll use ourselves that’s mentioned in the landscaping article.

I’ve actually visited the Plant-care.com website several times in the past when I’ve been looking up plant care information. I know I visited this site when I was looking up information on Aglaonemas – Chinese evergreens a couple of years ago. They had several articles about these easy to care for plants so they kept coming up in my Google searches. I actually think that’s how I discovered the site in the first place.

To close this long post I’d just like to get back to my original idea. if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know I get quite a bit of pleasure out of my landscaped backyard. I love it and visitors adore it. If you haven’t yet landscaped I would strongly encourage you to do so. You’ll get extra living space that I’m certain you’ll enjoy and it appears you’ll also increase the value of your home.

Take a look at the landscaping article. I’m sure you’ll get some great ideas for your own backyard landscaping.






Moving? Visit Relocation.com first

by

I’ve only moved a couple of times in my life, but after our last move from our apartment to our house I decided that if we ever sell our house we’ll hire professionals to help us with our move.

Let’s face it – moving is stressful. Sometimes a move is just a move from one home to another, but many times it also includes other life changes such as being newly married, starting a new job or a position in a new location, or the purchase of your first house. Why not hire professionals to assist you with every step of your move? You’d be able to deal with whatever other changes might be happening in your life that much better.

If you will be moving sometime in the near future or perhaps might be relocating from your present location because of work you might want to visit Relocation.com.

Relocation.com has everything to assist you with your move. The site doesn’t just list moving companies, no, they also have several sections that will help you with all aspects of relocating from purchasing real estate to securing a mortgage or getting a loan to help you finance your move.

In the moving section you’ll be able to find companies that will assist you with a move within your state, to another state or even your move from one country to another. There’s listings for self service moving, moving companies, auto transport, a moving guide that will help you be sure that your move goes well from start to finish, and listings for international shipping and storage companies.

The people who’ve created Relocation.com have really gone a long way towards making the site a one stop relocating resource. Not only will you find listings for everything that I’ve already mentioned, but you’ll find apartment hunting listings, be able to get quotes for home and auto insurance, find an handyman or renovation company for your home improvement, and you’ll even find a Career section where you can search for a job in your new location.

Do you see what I mean? Once you begin exploring the site you could use it for all of your relocation needs. They’ve thought of everything that has to do with moving and relocating from one area to another to make it that much easier for you.

I also noticed that there are a number of great articles in each section. For example if you are moving there’s the moving guide and a number of other great moving related articles. If you are looking for a mortgage there’s articles about home equity and home mortgage loans, a mortgage calculator and many other informative articles.

The site is quite impressive once you realize how many resources are at your fingertips. If you will be relocating in the near future do take a moment and visit relocation.com.

Reclaimed teak furniture

by

We have a hand crafted teak table. It’s made out of recovered or reclaimed teak. Since teak is a protected wood in many countries, yet still a product that many nations continue to rely on to fuel their economy some manufacturers of teak furniture have taken to using recovered teak wood. I really like the fact that this beautiful table that we purchased is made from reclaimed wood.

Our table was created out of what looks like thick teak branches that might have fallen to the forest floor, and perhaps part of a tree trunk – hopefully one that had been cut many years in the past.

It has a very irregular shape, but it’s absolutely beautiful.

I don’t have any good photos of it right now, but I’m going to be refinishing the table shortly so I’ll take some before and after photos so you can see how weathered it looks after sitting in my garden through the summer and how I rejuvenate it each year with a coat of danish teak oil.

I just went looking online to see if I could find anything quite like it so I could show you how beautiful my table is, but I was unsuccessful. I can’t believe how hard it was to find anything remotely similar.

Sometime this week I’ll get my sanding paper out and lightly rub down the table with some fine sand paper, clean it off with a tack cloth and then oil it. It’s almost like magic how beautiful the table looks after I give it this treatment that perhaps only takes an hour of my time.

Have you ever refinished furniture that you own? Or perhaps furniture that you’ve purchased used, or at a flea market that needs refinishing before it can really be put to good use?

Meta