Renovating Your Garden: 4 Careful Considerations When Revamping It From Top to Toe
Finding a property with a big garden feels like a dream come true, but when we think about upgrading this garden, there can be lots of work to ensure it becomes the picture-perfect pristine place we envisioned in our heads. When you are renovating and designing a garden, you’ve got to consider some of the following:
Establishing Boundaries
Boundaries are an amazing way for your garden to take shape quickly. When you are thinking about designing your garden space, you may want to work with a contractor or a landscaper, but it’s important to remember that a landscaper will not offer aesthetic suggestions- they will do what you suggest. Companies like masterscapes.com provide landscaping and lawn care to make the components more maintainable, but you’ve got to have in your mind what sort of garden you really want. This is why boundaries are the best place to begin.
It all depends on where you live; if you have a townhouse in the middle of an urban landscape, you may be better off choosing stone or brick boundaries that can obscure surrounding buildings or other unattractive sights. When it comes to a boundary, you need to make it feel like its own enclosed space. The right boundaries can also ensure you keep the neighbors out, but you have to establish where the boundaries lie in a legal sense.
Picking the Right Plants
Before you start picking the right plants, you’ve got to get an understanding of your current garden space. You need to measure the space properly. When you start to know the dimensions of every nook and cranny. you can decide what would be best suited in that space. You also need to understand where it is best to place plants according to the direction the garden faces.
If you have a north-facing garden, this will usually have shaded spots for most of the day, south-facing gardens have sunshine all throughout the day, a west-facing garden will have shade in the morning and sun in the afternoon, and east-facing gardens will get more sunlight in the morning and shade in the evening. Understanding the directions your garden faces will influence the types of plants you will buy. There are plenty of resources out there to help you. Websites like plantophiles.com provide information on the best plants for east-facing gardens, so once you understand your existing garden space, you can then push on with your initial design.
What to Think About When Designing the Garden
Once you understand what works best in your garden based on where it faces and the measurements, you can sketch your initial design. It doesn’t matter if you’re not artistically inclined, the great thing is that once you have the measurements in place, you can start to draw your ideal garden so you can visualize the areas that may benefit from more support as well as those parts that may not suit specific plants, in which case, you could fill the space with furniture or a play area for the children. This is an important stage because you can look it over and decide what is going to remain, but also decide on the things you are happy to change.
Ultimately, a big garden makeover should be a financially sound one. You don’t need to invest in more things than is necessary, which is why designing your garden and casting a critical eye on the good and bad points will help you choose something that works for the space. You need to think about the logical routes around the garden. If you have a smaller garden, think about the spaces you want you and/or your family to congregate. Ideally, you should plan your route before you start designing the space.
Establishing the Right Budget
The toughest thing about renovating a garden is that you can go to a local garden store and think that certain items will look amazing, but they are far from a good fit in your space! When you set the budget for your garden, a good rule of thumb is around 5% to 15% of the total value of your home. This gives you a good starting point because you can understand what is practical.
If you are planning to completely renovate the garden from top to bottom, with plants, decking, and even an outdoor BBQ, this can all easily add up. It’s at this point where the design will be worth its weight in gold! Choosing what your garden really needs, but also being realistic in terms of your budget will ensure that you land somewhere in the middle. The garden can serve a number of purposes, whether it’s summer garden parties or meditation space, so you may feel you’ve got to invest more upfront, but this is when you’ve also got to bear in mind the overall costs of maintaining it.
A picture-perfect garden requires a lot of work. Do you have the time to do it? If you do not because you’re all working full-time, you will need to think about the components of a low-maintenance garden. These could be things like turf, wood or stone chippings, or just a simple concrete path down the middle that can create two sides of a garden. Most people want their garden to look the part, and if your home is a picture-perfect palace, you will benefit from installing a swimming pool or an outhouse. But when you start designing your garden you have to keep an eye on that budget!
Renovating your garden can be a time-consuming subject. We all want it to look as amazing as possible, but designing a garden while also bearing in mind the overriding practicalities will give you a better understanding, not just of what you can achieve with your garden, but what is realistic. We all have some form of delusions of grandeur when it comes to renovating our homes, but if you go into it with your eyes open and have a proper plan, you will have a garden that will suit your needs.
