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Getting the Best Price for
your Home Includes Landscaping for Curb Appeal
by Michael J. McGroarty
If you own a home, then sooner or later you are going to
be ready to sell that home. Maybe you've already sold a home or two.
People tend to move more often than our parents did.
There are a
lot of things that go into getting the best possible price for
your
home, but the very first thing your home needs is curb appeal. When a
prospective buyer, or a realtor for that matter, pulls up in front of your
home, they immediately form an opinion about your house. Fair or not,
that's what people do. You can have the most beautiful home in the city,
but if prospective buyers don't get a super positive feeling about your
house the minute they lay eyes on it, they are going to enter and view the
rest of your house with a negative impression.
Fixing that problem
is easy enough to do.
When people pull up in front of your house
there are two things they see. A house, and the landscaping in front
of that house. If the landscaping is unattractive, the house will appear
to be unattractive. Landscaping for curb appeal does not cost a lot of
money, it's simply a matter of making sure the landscaping is neat, with
well defined edges, and colorful. But when landscaping for curb appeal,
the most important thing you need to do is to raise the beds with topsoil.
Of course you have to do this before you plant.
Plants do much
better in raised beds, and the plants in the beds really
stand out. In
order to raise the beds around your house you do not have to buy expensive
stones and build retaining walls. Just establish the outline of the
planting beds, cut an edge into the soil with a spade, and fill the
planting beds with approximately ten inches of good rich topsoil. You'd be
amazed at how much you can raise a planting bed without any type of
retention.
Here are two more things you don't need:
Plastic
edging. It's expensive, a lot of work to install, and it never
stays in
place. You can cut an edge with a spade and your landscape will actually
look better. Then you can make the bed a little larger any time you need
to.
The other thing you definitely do not need is weed control
fabric. The
stuff just doesn't work. The weeds grow right on top of the
fabric, then
root through the fabric making it even harder to keep your
beds weed free. You'll find a really good article on weed control on
my website.
When landscaping for curb appeal, plant placement and
selection is very important. In a corner bed you need a centerpiece. I
like Canadian
Hemlock because they are evergreen and provide an
excellent background for more colorful plants. In front of the Hemlock you
can use a bright colored evergreen like Gold Thread Cypress, but don't use
too many. Usually three is all you want. Around the backside of the same
bed you can use a darker evergreen like Taxus or even a flowering shrub
that you keep trimmed down low like Weigela. Lots of colors are fine, but
don't stagger the colored plants in your landscape, use them in groupings,
and be careful not to use too many in any one grouping. When you use more
than three of any colored
plant they lose their effectiveness. You are
adding them for contrast, and when used sparingly they look much
better.
There are lots of landscaping photos on my website that
will give you a lot of good ideas.
In front of a house I like to
use an arc of medium height plants like Blue Girl Holly, then put a couple
of taller plants behind the arc. When
landscaping for curb appeal you
want the landscape to stair step toward the house. In other words, the
lawn is the bottom step, the raised bed is step two, low growing plants
step three and so on.
If you are re-landscaping an older home you
probably should start with a sledge hammer before you do anything else and
bust out the sidewalk to the front door. Builders put in the ugliest
sidewalks in the world, and they usually are hard to maneuver as you walk
toward the front door. Once you have the old sidewalk removed, let your
imagination run wild. Remember, you are landscaping for curb appeal, and
there is no better way to establish ultimate curb appeal than with a
beautiful curved walk that gently winds its way to the front door. Once
again, there are photos of such sidewalks on my website, and you'll see
what wonderful landscaping opportunities they present.
The last
step in landscaping for curb appeal is to create an interesting
shaped
raised bed in the front yard. Fill this bed with spring
flowering
bulbs, and annual flowers for the summer. If your house is
going to be on the market in the fall, add some chrysanthemums for a burst
of fall color.
So what's the best benefit of landscaping for curb
appeal? You'll gain
great experience so you can make sure your new home
is landscaped just the way you want it!
Michael J. McGroarty is the author of this article. Visit
his most interesting website, http://www.freeplants.com and sign up
for his excellent gardening newsletter. Article provided by http://gardening-articles.com.
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Landscaping for curb
appeal 
