DIY Landscape for New Home

Landscaping typically is the last thing to be done after building or remodeling a home. Some custom home builders include landscaping in their price, but with Adair Homes this is an opportunity for home owners to put in sweat equity. It’s one area that you’ll want to remember to budget for as it comes at the very end and is easy to forget about. Some jurisdictions require a certain amount of landscaping to be done for occupancy, so you’ll want to make sure you check on this early on as you don’t want to be surprised by it when it’s time to move in.

There is a lot of traffic from different trades during construction, so you don’t really want to put in new landscaping just to have it destroyed. The difficult thing with landscaping is that the seasons dictate when you can do it.

If your home is completed too late into the fall there might not be time for plants to establish before winter. If it’s completed in the middle of winter you have to wait until spring to start. Summer is not the best time to plant grass because of the heat.

Our house was completed in January and we knew that we would not be able to start landscaping until spring. Unfortunately, we had a lot of rain during the early part of spring, so we have been waiting for the soil to dry out. If the soil is too wet then it compacts too much and there is not enough air in it.

After a few weeks of dry weather we decided to finally get started on it. It’s still on the early side as some of the soil was still very wet, but at least we are getting some of it done.

The first step for us was to get the concrete patio poured. We ended up deciding on going with concrete because it’s low maintenance. We had this done a couple of weeks ago and have been waiting for it to dry out. Last weekend we were able to stand on it and this weekend we’ll put furniture on it.

The next step is rough grading of the yard. This goal of this step is to get the general grade in place before trenching the irrigation. Last weekend we worked on grading the yard. We had a lot of extra soil saved to fill in some areas that were low and to back fill the patio. We were able to get most of the front yard done and a large mound of dirt in the backyard was used to help fill in around the back patio.

We’ve been in the house for three months now and it’s nice to finally be able to get started on some of the landscaping. It’s hard to be patient, but waiting for the right timing is going to make things come out better in the end. Thanks for following along as we continue to work on projects on our house!