A gorgeous landscape not only gives your home amazing curb appeal but also helps you increase your property’s value by a lot. Rather than rely on a team of professional landscape consultants, however, you can teach yourself how to landscape like a pro. Here’s how you can do this, and on a budget to boot.
Plan Ahead
The very first thing you can do is to plan ahead. Sit down and write out exactly what you want and how you hope to achieve it. Next, set a budget to help you stay within the confines of what you can comfortably spend. Doing this will ensure that you don’t go overboard as far as expenses go and that you can have some money left over for unforeseen situations. Also, keep your plans flexible and avoid getting hung up over being unable to achieve what you had hoped to. With the average American moving about 11.7 times during their lifetime, you may end up moving out and going to a new place that meets your landscaping needs with minimal effort. For this reason, don’t make your plans set in stone, but just flow with the process and change your plans when you need to.
Reuse and Repurpose
Something else you should do is reuse and repurpose old items. Doing this will ensure you spend a small amount or nothing at all but still get something that looks and feels new. Old furniture, for instance, is something that you can give new life by painting it afresh or reupholstering it if need be. Doing this will let you flex your DIY muscle and also keep some material from ending up in a landfill.
Try Alternative Materials
When landscaping on a budget, you need to keep an open mind and be prepared to try out different materials. This will be beneficial for you because some materials that have been used traditionally can be costly to acquire and complicated to work with, such as decorative stones. If you’re willing to try their artificial counterparts, in this case, you will be able to make some savings while getting something close to what you wanted. With 75% of top agents saying that homes with good landscaping are worth anywhere from 1% to 10% more than those without it, you will be happy to know you can experience a similar increase on a budget.
Plant Trees and Functional Plants
As you add greenery to your environment, it’s good to go for more than just aesthetics. Think about planting trees that will serve to provide you with shade and that may also bear fruit, for instance. If you would enjoy becoming a gardener, consider planting food crops and herbs that you can eat and you will escape the cost of going to the store to buy them every time you need some. Apart from saving you time and money, you will also have an easier time eating healthy meals as you have the ingredients you need right outside your home.
Light it Up
Finally, you may want to brighten your landscape but keep your costs low. While this is not an advisable project for DIY due to the risk of handling electricity, you can entrust the technical parts to a professional and then pick energy-saving LED lights. Alternatively, you can get solar lights and save both your money and the environment as you will be making use of green energy. You may place the lights around areas you’ve decorated with rock so you can realize the full beauty of the spaces. If you have flagstone, for instance, which is a sedimentary rock that’s been broken up into layers and used to landscape, you can improve its looks by adding some lights on and around it.
With these tips, you can get to work beautifying your landscape on a budget. You will enjoy the new look of your landscape and also possibly become a force to reckon with as far as small landscaping projects go!