Your landscape is a huge part of your house. Or, at least, it should be. With proper landscaping, you can extend your living space into and around your yard. You can cultivate beautiful sceneries to enjoy in your backyard and add considerable curb appeal to your home for when you ever want to place it back on the market. There’s a reason that beautiful landscaping adds so much to an area. Why are castles and palaces in Europe surrounded by stunning gardens? It’s because being outside is nice, and being outside in a yard that you can be proud of is simply excellent.

That’s why Turf Fox provides exceptional residential landscaping services to the Sarasota area. We know better than anyone else how much a beautifully designed yard can add to an area. Thus, if you’re looking to start expanding your living space and making the most of your time outdoors, you’re probably in need of high-quality residential landscaping services.

Increase Your Living Space

Barbeques are a widely recognized good time in the United States as well as the rest of the world. Grilling outside in the sun while kids run through the hose is a piece of Americana with strong cultural associates like apple pie. But that’s just the social aspect of having a nice outdoor area that you can enjoy with friends and family. The seating area and hard surfaces you carve into your land can also act as a piece of respite in your own home. You’ll be able to cultivate stunning plant life that gives you a great sense of accomplishment and enhances the look and feel of your landscape.

Picture this: After work, you pick up a new novel you’ve been meaning to read, seat yourself in a lawn chair on your patio, right next to a fresh English rose bush and relax. With a stunning landscape always at hand, it’s much easier to stop and smell the roses. You’ll have another room in the house to spend time in and a place to convene with nature without having to drive too far outside of civilization. It’s an excellent way to start making the absolute most of your property space.

Curb Appeal & Home Value

A beautiful yard is a major advantage. House buyers know that. While a clean slate is always attractive to a skilled gardener, for the average person it can be intimidating. It’s an added advantage when you’re looking at houses and you find one that already has a beautiful and improved yard. Mature plant growth and a hard surface to place lawn furniture on is a major advantage and will give your house an edge on the competition. People want a house that they don’t have to do much work to, especially if they don’t particularly enjoy yard work. A plug-and-play landscape already built and polished in your backyard, where all they have to do to keep their plants alive is to set a timer on a sprinkler is what most homeowners will value.

In fact, it’s been found that spending as little as 5% of your home’s value on landscaping can retrieve a return on your investment up to 150%. With those numbers, it’s hard not to rationalize improving your outdoor space, because, even if everyone in your home won’t love it already, the pay-back value of it is significant enough that it makes sense.

Increase Privacy

While it’s a good idea to have a positive relationship or acquaintance with your neighbors, you don’t need them taking a peek at everything you do, night and day. Landscaping provides a subtle and easy way to give your yard the privacy you want. It’s an old trick for road side houses in London to install a lovely hedge to prevent passers-by from peeking in their windows. It’s reasonable to assume the same could be accomplished with more space and vegetation for a larger property in the Sarasota area. Hedges, trees and bushes make for excellent privacy boosters on any property. This is especially important if your property faces a busy street, or if houses around you have decks and high windows that would make it easy to see into your yard.

What’s lucky is that many hedge-style plants and bushes do well in the local climate. Thus, while tending to your live privacy fence might be tedious at first, once they’re established, they’ll grow and flourish in the friendly weather and become a passive gardening task that you only have to do occasionally to keep them healthy and happy. Additionally, real estate agents have found that houses with lots of privacy sell around 45% faster than the average house across several different areas of the U.S. After all, your home should be just for you and should feel safe and secure, rather than like someone is or could be watching you.