11 Feb FIVE WAYS LANDSCAPING WILL BENEFIT YOUR PROPERTY
By Hugh Morton, Designer and Owner
We feel it’s important to understand the many benefits an updated landscape can add to your home. Our landscape designer and owner, Hugh Morton, gives you his top five reasons why you should start your plan for updating in 2020.
Value
This always comes up during the design and estimating portion of the process. Homeowners and business owners alike want to know the return value they will get with their new landscape. Here are some guidelines:
- Revamping the front of your house and cleaning up the property to list your property can help you get people in the front door.
- Trees hold their value for many years.
- Shrubs and perennials have aesthetic value only because of their shorter life span. Consider these elements like re-painting your house.
- Hardscape like decks, patios, water features, walls and pools all have an excellent return on their investment. You may have to consider the neighborhood you are improving but these items professionally installed have the potential for 100% return on the original cost.
The bottom line is to weigh your budget against personal gain and ask what your end goal is.
Aesthetics
Updating the outside of your house is important. There are always new varieties of plants coming out that improve upon flowering color, hardiness, shape and seasonal interest. Make sure you are taking the time to analyze your landscapes to make sure your plants are performing well or if they are being maintained properly.
Utility
Sometimes we just need to simply improve our landscape. Maybe we have too many planting beds and need to change out mulch beds to river rock or even back to sod. Is there a sump pump wreaking havoc on the side of the house and we can extend that with a drainage system to another area? Some other utility-oriented projects are rebuilding walls that are failing, filling ponds that have leaked for years, cleaning and sealing old patios to give them a new look, replacing dead shrubs or even installing some new plants as a privacy screen.
Functionality
We always receive many calls to help rearrange or fix issues in our outdoor environment. Usually, these calls start with a problem that needs a solution. Some examples are:
- Areas where the grass is not growing properly
- Drainage solutions can be developed for low areas that are continuously saturated
- Installing flagstone steppers for access to or through planting beds
- Installing raised vegetable gardens or providing shade for a seating area
- Installing a new bed for screening or in an area where it does not make sense for grass to be growing
Entertainment
One of the highlights of our industry and the potential for the largest return on its values is an outdoor entertainment design. As designers, we love the opportunity to be creative and know of the joy we can give to others by creating a wonderful outdoor space. The sky is the limit so if you ever have the opportunity to be apart of a Sun Valley outdoor entertainment design please bring lots of ideas and personality to the initial meeting!
Working with us allows us to do what we love every day and live out our mission, “We wake up every day with the hope that we can allow others to enjoy the outdoors as much as we do”.
