How to Landscape Your Yard

Our yards are people's first glimpse at our homes. They're the frame that encircles how we lead our lives and what people can expect from the buildings inside. Unfortunately, many yards under-deliver and underwhelm. If you want your yard to look bigger or more like a home and gardens magazine, here are the top tips to help you landscape your yard.

Plan Heavily

In the best cases, you would do this step in the winter before, but you can start any time of the year and be fine. Pull out pencil and paper or a drawing app on your phone or computer, and sketch out the general shape of your yard. If you do this on the computer, it can be even easier because you can draw your yard's overhead image from Google images.

Consider the following:

What do you want to show off?

Does your home have a gorgeous tall entryway door that you want to draw the eye to? Is there some other part of your property you want to accentuate? If so, use the shape of how you lay your flower beds and shrubs to show that off.

What do you want to change?

If your home is on risers and you want to hide that, you can use shrubs six inches away from your home to eat away at that appearance. If your yard is smaller, you can frame it with flowers or shrubs in a way to make it look both deeper and more significant.

What Are Your Tastes?

When You look at images of other homeowners' yards, what excites you the most? This could mean that you're into a complete picket fence around the property or that you like the look of a natural grass garden. Consider looking at Arlington real estate listings for inspiration on what you could do. By looking at others, you'll quickly learn what you hate and love.

Start With Aerated Soil

The foundation that you build your yard up is as essential as the foundation your home is built upon. Take care to ensure your soil is well leveled and well aerated. Checking the leveling now will make it less of a headache than finding out about the issue after you updated the yard.

Consider How To Match Your Home

If you have a fence, it should match the shutters and other details on your home. Consider getting a matching brick color to the wall in your gardens if you have a brick home. You can do bright and colorful things, but that should be in your flowers and plants, not the walls and fences.

Maintain Everything

If, once you’ve planted all of your flowers and plants, you don’t maintain your yard and keep it up: it will quickly go downhill. You don't want to waste all of your hard work by forgetting to water or cover things from the ice. Look up each of your plants, and figure out the care for them year-round. Plants are always beautiful the first couple days after you plant them; it's your job to ensure that beauty stays up year-round.