Boosting Curb Appeal: Transform Your Outdoor Space With These Design Tips
If you walk around any neighborhood, you’ll notice that there’s always a yard bursting with color and cute little accents that make your own yard look like a wasteland in comparison.
Don’t feel embarrassed – boosting your yard’s curb appeal takes work, but it’s simpler than you realize!
At Zimmerman Mulch, we offer quality outdoor products and over 25 years of experience to transform your landscape into an attractive living space. We would love to help you get a head start on the beautiful yard that you and your family deserve.
What is Curb Appeal?
“Curb appeal” is a term used by realtors to describe the general attractiveness of a house or other piece of property as viewed from the sidewalk by a prospective buyer.
Of course, selling your house shouldn’t be the only reason you’d want to improve your curb appeal. When you improve your curb appeal, you benefit by making your home look nicer and contributing to a prettier-looking neighborhood. Let’s look at some projects that add beauty and enjoyment to your home.
Plants and Flowers
Let’s start with the simple yet powerful impact of adding color to your yard. Flowers, with their vibrant hues and delicate fragrances, bring life to a yard and create a welcoming ambiance. In fact, realtors recommend decorating your porch and front yard with flowers as one of the essential steps to improving curb appeal.
Choosing the right flowers for your location is critical. Consider your local climate, the sun your yard gets, and the bloom times to create a consistently beautiful space throughout the year. If you don’t know what kind of flowers will thrive in your area or climate, your local garden supply center will be happy to help.
To kick your landscape design up a notch, consider using plant mass (filling a space with groups of the same plant for impact or harmony) to achieve symmetry in your landscape.
Mulching
Now that you’ve planted some plants and flowers around your house, you’d want to ensure that the result of your hard work stays alive and well-fed. Aside from water, the other vital component for your colorful new oasis is mulch.
Mulch is a vital part of a well-planted garden. It adds a layer of beauty to your plants, making your landscaping look more polished and put together. The variety of colors available makes mulch ideal for accentuating the colors of your plants.
And mulch isn’t just a decorative addition. It offers a myriad of benefits as well:
Weed suppression: Weeds need sunlight to germinate. Placing mulch over the surface blocks sunlight from reaching the soil, preventing unsightly weed seeds from germinating.
Moisture retention: Mulch also forms a barrier over the soil, preventing moisture from evaporating too rapidly. This keeps the soil moist and the plants watered for longer periods of time.
Soil health: Like that valedictorian classmate from high school who knew and did everything, organic mulch does so much and then some. As the mulch decomposes, it releases nutrients into the soil, which, in turn, feeds the plants and also helps fend off plant disease. It also regulates soil temperature, acting as insulation to prevent the alternating freezes and thaws that can push plants out of the ground.
Once you’ve chosen your mulch, clear your planting areas and spread an even layer about 2 inches thick, keeping the mulch a few inches away from the base of your plants to prevent rot. Finally, maintain your mulch by adding a fresh layer every year to keep your garden looking its best.
There are so many ways mulch can accentuate your yard that we posted an entire blog about creative uses for mulch.
Gravel and Stone
Adding gravel and stone is an easy way to add beauty and interest to your yard. With a variety of colors and textures to choose from, gravel and stone are a cost-effective and environmentally friendly option to decorate your yard or flower bed.
While costing more upfront there are pros to using decorative gravel in place of mulch, one of the more prominent ones being it doesn't need to be reapplied year after year. With the weight and size of the stone it's also less likely to wash out with excessive rain than wood mulch is.
There’s a common misconception that gravel and stone are the same. Not exactly! By definition, gravel is naturally occurring, loose, rounded rock particles, while stone is produced by mechanically crushing rock – also commercially known as crushed stone. Generally, gravel has rounded edges, while stone is angular in shape. And because landscapers love to talk about gravel and stone, we’ve also written a deep dive into gravel and stone.
With some meticulous planning, as moving all these heavy stones is not very fun, stone and gravel can accent your landscaping by creating lines and spaces to segregate areas in your yard or create pathways to lead visitors through your garden.
Some people enjoy using gravel and stone so much that they end up with a rock garden. If that sounds good to you, rock on!
Hardscaping
Now that we’ve discussed landscaping using gravel and stone, we’ll talk about complementing your landscaping with hardscaping.
Think of hardscaping as an outdoor room. A hardscape is a term for decks, patios, landscaped walkways, sitting walls, retaining walls, water features, fire pits, pergolas, lighting, and more. Simply put, hardscapes are manmade landscape materials that add structure to your yard.
A lot of these projects have an added layer of complexity in the form of plumbing (for water features), construction (decks, patios, walls, pergolas, firepits), or even electrical wiring (lighting).
Hardscaping comes with many benefits that make all the time and expense worthwhile:
Beauty: A well-executed hardscape is beautiful to look at, complements the design of your home and garden, and provides a space outdoors to enjoy by yourself or with guests.
Better Yard Functionality: Adding features such as fire pits, sitting walls, low voltage lighting and sound systems, and outdoor kitchens can transform your bare backyard into a practical area where you can entertain friends and families for years to come! Throw in a pergola or pavilion for shelter from the elements and you’ve created the perfect outdoor living space!
Boost Your Resale Value: Beautiful hardscapes add a luxurious feel to a home, which is a bonus for prospective homebuyers. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) states that professional landscaping can increase a home’s price tag by 15 to 20 percent when it comes to resale.
If this all sounds hard (pun intended), check out our blog about hardscapes that’ll make it easier to embark on your project. While Zimmerman Mulch doesn't install hardscapes, we offer quality products and can get you connected with a trustworthy contractor to help bring your dreams to reality!
Outdoor Lighting
Low voltage outdoor lighting is also a part of hardscaping, but it’s important enough to expand on the topic slightly. There are additional benefits to outdoor lighting that are only available during the night, such as:
Nighttime Aesthetics: Strategically placed and curated lighting makes your outdoor features and landscape pop and look amazing in the evenings. Exterior lighting is considered a prime feature, so it adds curb appeal even when it’s dark!
Security, Safety, and Financial Benefits: Outdoor lighting may help decrease homeowner’s insurance by adding visibility to the home’s exterior in the dark. This discourages would-be prowlers from skulking about in the dark and allows you to walk around safely in your yard at night instead of tripping over those nice rocks you put out by the flowers to enhance your curb appeal.
If you’d like to learn more about lighting your yard, check out our enlightening blog about landscape lighting!
Tying It All Together
We’ve discussed the various projects you could do to improve your curb appeal. Next, we should discuss the importance of a cohesive design that ties all elements together. Unfortunately, curb appeal isn’t as simple as getting rocks, plants, firepits, lights, and mulch and throwing it all on your yard—some thought has to be put into making sure everything looks balanced and coordinated:
Maintain your lawn: Much like the skin is the human body's largest organ, your lawn is the largest, most visible component of your yard. Ensure that it’s green and healthy by mowing regularly, using the correct height setting on your mower for your type of grass, watering the lawn regularly, especially during dry periods, and using fertilizer to help your grass grow healthy, lush, and green.
Compatible colors, textures, and styles: Be the envy of your neighborhood by using design elements that mesh together, creating a cohesive look. Visualize your landscape as a single canvas, much like you would decorate your bedroom or living room by making sure the curtains, furniture, cabinets, and cushions coordinate. Deep flower beds allow your plants to grow full and healthy to cover up bare patches at the same time, while multiples of decorative items placed strategically around the garden pull the space together to create harmony.
This seemingly simple task can take some imagination and hard work, so there’s no shame in admitting that you might not seem up to it. That’s why professional landscape companies exist: to help turn appeal for help into curb appeal!
conclusion
As you can see, you can add curb appeal to your lawn in many ways, with various degrees of complexity. The majority of these can be done with a wheelbarrow and some shovels, while others may require a little more planning and budgeting. If that's the case don't hesitate to reach out to the Zimmerman Mulch Team as they are eager to help you find the products that best suit your application and can connect you with professionals to do the installation for you.
At Zimmerman Mulch, we have been bringing beauty and relaxation to our deserving customers for over 25 years, and we hope to be your partner with your landscaping needs.
We exist to bring beauty to the lives of others—visit or call us today, and we’ll help you get there!