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Why Hardscaping Is a Worthy Investment for your Home
When you think of landscaping, your mind often goes to planting flowers and bushes and growing grass on your lawn. But, this is only half of the equation for making the most of your outdoor living space. In addition to an even lawn and beautiful garden beds, hardscaping can bring the best out of your home.
What is Hardscaping?
Hardscaping refers to the addition and use of man-made elements to change the visible features of your outdoor areas. These elements could include gazebos, fences, decks, walls, enclosures, and artificial water fixtures. As you can guess, not only are they pleasing to the eye, several of these also provide a functional purpose for any home.
Benefits of Hardscaping
1. Makes Your Yard Easier to Maintain
Plants take a lot of work to maintain. You need to mow the lawn and have it weeded, sprinkled, and fertilized. You would have to do some of the same for your garden beds in addition to the occasional mulching and trimming. And, if some bare patches come up due to foot traffic, you would have to seed these too.
Placing a concrete pad, pavers, or a garden path on frequently traveled areas will make your maintenance easier. And, this doesn’t need a significant investment as you have affordable options like gravel or wooden step paths. Moreover, you can use ornamental fencing as a decorative and functional installation to keep pets and children out of certain areas.
2. Increase the Living Area of Your Home
There’s nothing wrong with having lawn or garden beds. But, you don’t have to leave the space untouched. You can place a deck, a patio, gazebo, fire pit, or an outdoor grill in your backyard. If designed well, it won’t disrupt the natural beauty of your outdoor space. It can even complement it as what you would see in professionally landscaped yards. In addition to this, you get the obvious benefit of having more living space for relaxation and gatherings.
3. Complements the Green Spaces of Your Yard
Hardscaping doesn’t have to take over the natural space of your backyard. It can complement it and make your plants stand out even more. You can add trellises or living walls to place plant life in front of a blank wall or to liven up the façade of your perimeter fencing. You can add an arbor to serve as support for climbing plants and as a passageway for a path or gate. And, if you have limited space in your yard, you can use vertical planters to add more greenery that you would not have otherwise.
Moreover, hardscaping can help the maintenance of your green spaces easier. You can add retaining walls to prevent certain sections of your yard from eroding. You can add a French drain to prevent surface water from moving all over your lawn and submerging parts of it for days at a time.
4. Personalize Your Outdoor Space
The generic backyard with only a lawn and some garden beds is a blank canvas of opportunities for its owner. If you want your backyard as your private retreat, you can add a gazebo or a shaded deck where you can relax surrounded by nature. If you want a place to entertain guests or to cook outdoors, an outdoor kitchen and a patio might be more to your tastes. If you want a place for outdoor exercise, it can even be a pool or a simple concrete pad. There’s a lot more that you can do and you will definitely find the best additions to your home that will give you what you want from your backyard.
And, even if you only have a small backyard, there are a variety of options available to you. If you want to have a fountain or a koi pond, you can have a small above-ground pond installed. If you want to spend time relaxing outdoors, you could add a small deck with enough space for two deck chairs and a coffee table. And, if you want to have an outdoor living area without any insects or dead leaves getting into it, you can have a screened patio enclosure and you wouldn’t lose that outdoor feel.
5. Improve the Safety of Your Home
Hardscaping is a must if you want a safer home. Adding a perimeter fence can discourage trespassers and other malcontents from entering your property or breaking into your home. Fences and enclosures in your yard can keep wildlife out and prevent them from damaging your property and causing harm. And, if you have a pool, you can have pool fencing or an enclosure installed to prevent any accidents.
6. Use Less Water in Maintaining Your Yard
Hardscaping some parts of your yard will take up some of your green spaces. This is not something negative for the environment since you’re using less water in maintaining the yard. This helps in conserving the water supply in your area. And, you will also find yourself spending less on water utilities.
7. Can Increase the Value of Your Property
Landscaping is one of the best ways to increase the value of your property. And, hardscaping requires little maintenance so you will definitely get some of your investment back. Furthermore, decks, gazebos, patios, and outdoor kitchens are living spaces and these add the most value to any home.
8. Provides both function and form to your yard
Most hardscaping elements provide function and form at the same time. Because of this, it makes a cost-effective way in getting both for the outdoor areas of your home. For example, a gazebo provides a shaded living area in the outdoors and can serve as an aesthetic centerpiece for your yard. Ornamental fences and custom gates can keep animals out of your garden beds while providing visual contrast to your plants. A perimeter fence provides privacy and security but it can also complement the design of your home. And, if you think that there’s no way a driveway can be made beautiful, just have a search for examples that use pavers, cobblestones, or crushed gravel.
Interested in Extending Your Living Spaces to the Outdoors?
Whether you want to add fences for your property or your garden bed, we can take care of it for you. We can also install custom fence enclosures from simple pool fences to elegant patio screen enclosures. And, no job is too small for us as we can add small additions like an integrated railing system to your deck or existing enclosure. Contact us now for a quote for our services.