How to Spruce Up your Yard

Whether you want to spruce up your yard for entertaining or you're trying to sell and would like to enhance your home's curb appeal quickly and inexpensively, this article will fill you in on the basics of sprucing up your yard.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Gardening Gloves
• Lawnmower
• Hedge Trimmer and Clippers
• Lawn Waste Bags
• As an added bonus - extra helpers to lend a hand

1. One of the main ways for a yard to look bad is for it to be too cluttered. Start by picking up all the clutter throughout the yard. This could be children's toys, branches and twigs that have fallen from trees, or even previous years' gardening leftovers, such as planters and pots, that were not reused. Decide what you want to keep and what can be tossed. If something has been sitting in the yard and hasn't been used for a year or two, toss it. You'll probably never use it again and if you store it in the shed or garage, you'll just be moving the clutter around.

2. Now go around and trim your bushes and trees with your hedge clippers. It's very easy to let trees and bushes get overgrown and to get used to the look, but once you've trimmed them, you'll be amazed at how much better the overall appearance will be. A good rule of thumb is that bushes should generally not stick up higher than the bottom of your windown ledges and tree limbs should not droop low enough that people have to duck under them.

3. Once you've trimmed your hedges, go ahead and mow your lawn. By mowing your lawn after trimming trees and bushes, your lawnmower will pick up some of the left over branches and twigs that have fallen while trimming. If you have a bag for your lawnmower, this would be the time to use it. It will be a little more work to bag your clippings but your lawnmower will act as a vacuum and pick up any scatterings throughout your yard.

4. One of the more tedious steps, but also one of the most rewarding, is to pull all weeds from your rock and garden areas, and from the cracks between your sidewalk and driveway. Again, this is one of those things that is easy to let go, and to get used to the look, but once you clean it up you'll never want to let it get overgrown again. For rock and garden areas you might want to consider buying a weed-stopping spray that will not kill flowers or plants but will keep weeds from re-appearing.

5. Finally, give all your patio furniture a good wipedown, or if it needs it and you feel ambitious enough, a new coat of paint and new cushions. With just one day's work your yard will look amazing and you'll reap the rewards in the form of compliments from friends and neighbors or added cash in your pocket when selling your house.

Tips & Warnings

• Once you've done all this work to spruce up your yard, try to stay on top of things like weeds and mowing about once a week. It's much easier to stay on top of things than to let it get out of hand and have to put a whole day into it.
• Be careful if you have pets or children and you're using weed-killer or any kind of chemicals or fertilizers.

[grammastacie]

on 9/19/2009 5* and recommend. Nice article.

[cdclocks]

on 7/22/2009 Good spring time checklist. Thanks! 5*

[tracysmith159]

on 7/16/2009 Good article. Lawn chores can be a pain but when the family all works together its gets done much faster. For some odd reason my oldest likes to pull weeds. Maybe the nighbors would pay him to pull some. lol.

[keithcs]

on 7/2/2009 Great ideas, thanks for sharing!