Using A Landscaper

We have never dealt with a landscaper before but we decided for this house we would give it a try. It seemed that with our last house we had spent the better part of 20 years trying to get it right. We would plant plants and they wouldn’t grow…or bloom. Then someone would tell us why…”Oh you can’t plant that near a pine tree the soil is to acidic”…or “Yes, the tag says full sun but they don’t mean Florida’s full sun.” I really was starting to think that maybe, just maybe it would be cheaper in the long run to have the professionals do it.

The landscaper that we used drew the plan up for free for us. Some charge around a $100 for this service but that alone is a wonderful thing to have. You might want to consider getting this done.

They asked me what style of plantings I like…that was hard for me to say because I don’t really know what kind of plant styles there are out there. I went with “Southern Living with a Florida twist”…hehehe..doesn’t that sound like I knew what I was talking about?

We then walked around the property and I told her kind of what I thought I wanted…not plants but where I thought sidewalks should go…and the views I wanted blocked and not blocked.

A few days later we had a plan that was wonderful. The problem was I had no idea what any of these plants that were listed were. This is when you run to your computer and start looking them all up. It was easiest for me to print them…in glossy picture form and walk around the yard with them. I wanted to really get a feel what it was going to look like. We asked her to change a few of the plants and then work up the price for it all…

WOW!!!! Who knew that a few plants could add up to so much? I had heard once that you should spend 20% of the price of the house landscaping it.  I had not really worked those numbers into my budget. So now what?

It was time to get creative. First we got another quote on the sprinkler system…a company that just does sprinklers were able to do it for half the price as the landscaper, but we needed a whole lot more money taken off to make this work. Then we started to highlight the drawing. We highlighted all the plants that would be seen from the front yard and asked for a price on just that.

Things were starting to look more do able but more trimming was needed.

Mulch…they wanted $3600 to mulch our yard. Isn’t that crazy????  So we cut that out of the bid and then gave them the go ahead.

We now have $500 in mulch…a much more sensible number.

A lot more work for Mr. Amazing…

I love how the house looks. I would have never been able to come up with a landscape plan like this. Photos coming soon…

The beds in the back yard are all ready for us to put plants in when time and money allows…and thanks to the plan we know what to look for and we won’t be moving sod to make it happen.

For now our nights are busy laying mulch but for $500 complared to $3600 ….we can do that.

Have you ever used a landscaper before?