You find someone who will give you what you want. You might check your state's organization for landscape design and installation professionals. In Colorado, for example, it's the ALCC, Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado. The organization has a list of members that may be posted online. That would be a starting point for you. You could also check ASLA, the Assocation of Landscape Architects. A landscape architect will likely be more expensive than a landscape designer. But if your project is relatively simple with no major drainage issues or tall retaining walls, a landscape design and build company could probably handle your project.

Third vote for the home designer software. We had an architect give us a bid and it was outrageous--apparently architects usually bid in terms of a percentage of the total budget, but our $25k-$30k budget was too small for his usual approach (!) so he quoted us a flat fee of (COUGH COUGH COUGH) $10 to $15k. Um! No!! We ended up buying a new iMac and the Home Designer software, and we could've bought another four or five iMacs for what this architect wanted. And he wasn't a big firm, just a well-respected, established local architect who specializes in remodeling old homes in a way that looks appropriate to their original style. He personally would not bid for just drawing up plans and letting us take it from there--he liked to be more involved, help choose contractors etc.--but my understanding is that the architects who would just give us plans would still want at least $3000 or more for that, which, again, is a lot more than our iMac + Home Design software. I ended up doing a ton of different plans with the software, posting them and getting feedback here, and now we have a plan we like a lot. No architect OR kitchen designer required. That being said, you will need to hire an electrician to get your wiring designed and implemented properly--even if you are very handy and capable of doing it yourself, that would probably void your homeowner's insurance, so if there were ever an electrical fire you would be totally screwed. (I say "probably"--check with your insurance company to be sure.) It also can mess with resale value. The only way I can think of to get the electrical system designed properly without hiring an electrician to do the design, assuming you can do this without voiding your insurance, is to get the version of the Chief Architect Home Design software that lets you (1) design the electrical system in detail AND (2) check your design against national codes. As you can see from this matrix (in the link), that means you have to get the "Pro" version. By the way, be sure you read what the Chief Architect website says about the computer requirements to run the software. Very few laptops have fast enough processors to do the 3D rendering, and ours certainly didn't, so since our only desktop was literally like ten years old we ended up having to get a new computer to use this software. But still, I'd rather spend $2200 on a fantastic 27" iMac and this software, and be able to create infinite kitchen plans and tweak them as much as I need to, and have this great computer for years, than spend $3000-$5000-$10,000-whatever to get an architect to give me one or two kitchen plans. And if you use PCs rather than Macs, your computer expense will probably be smaller than ours was anyway. Here is a link that might be useful: Chief Architect Home Designer product comparison

Hey everyone, I'm back! We met with the landscape designer who gave us some ideas for layout, materials and plantings (most of what he provided was non-evergreen perennials). We chewed on that for a while and had a local stone mason put in a walkway and a few small stone walls for us. Here's how things ended up: We were having a hard time with the area along the driveway because we plow in the winter and I was worried about hitting anything we put there with the plow. We ended up installing a small stone wall set back a bit from the driveway and put a small sweep in it that roughly echoed the geometry of the gazebo. We threw a few large stones in the mix for interest but, honestly, they may be moved, laid down or removed all together. As we try to think about plantings we find they're very much driving what our options are which we find is making things difficult. In the end there are a few things that, in hindsight, we'd tweak with the walkway and wall layout but overall we're please with how it all came together. So now we're onto plantings. Frankly this is the hardest part for us. We took a trip to to local nursery yesterday,(it was huge) were they have acres of plants discounted for fall, many are 40% off. We walked through, took photos of what we liked, but we're still struggling to decide how everything will fit together. There are definitely some nice rhododendrons we like and we'll probably grab. Worst case, if we don't like them in this bed we can move them somewhere else. Our goal is to get the 'bones' of the garden in this fall. However, as we walked around the garden center and tried to figure out what we should be considering it drove home the point that we didn't know how many we needed because we don't know where everything is going. We came back last night and tried doing a few layouts using the layout plan below. The brown is our bed area and each square measures 2'x2'. I note that we're definitely going to widen out the bed around the Gazebo. However, we're struggling. Around the gazebo we we're thinking of placing a rhododendron at each corner with some other summer flowering plant between them, something like a hydrangea or summersweet. We were thinking of carrying the rhododendron across the front of the house but we're worried it's going to become too repetitive. We're tried a few different layouts but we're sort of stuck. We're leaning away from any sort of small tree in the large flowerbed to the left since we're planting a large ornamental tree in our yard to the right of the house (where the small lilac bush is now). We also worry that putting a small tree in the bed would look odd with any sort of medium to large evergreen shrubs just 6-8 feet behind it? We seem to think so. That said, we totally recognize this isn't our bailiwick. Currently, we've kinda dismissed small trees as options. Maybe that's a mistake. We've gone back and forth a hundred times but we're definitely spinning our wheels. So, I'll put the question to those who have far more practice - how would you approach laying out the bones of this garden? We just want to be sure we have a good mix of evergreens in here, we were thinking rhododendrons or some other flowering shrub, since leaves are only on the trees for about 6 months of the year here.

Oh, I've been involved in 10K kitchen remodels. Small ones though. Stock off the shelf crapinets, 2K. Laminate counters fabricated to fit, 1K. Apartment grade appliances, 2.5K. Vinyl floors $500. Sink, faucet, disposal, $600. New replacement center light fixture, $100. New DIY paint, $100. No electrical at all. Just the plumbing reconnects to the crappy old drains and shut off valves, because penny wise and pound foolish. And 4K worth of licensed, insured, and background checked contractor labor, from someone that you'd actually want to allow in your home, to demo all of the old, legally dispose of it, and install the fresh new in the apartment.