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Landscape Design

First time home owner, what to do first?

6 years ago

Hey all, appreciate your perspective here. First time home owner, never had to take care of a yard before. Existing yard seems in decent shape, good "bones," some tree cleanup. I've attached some pictures. What to tackle first? What do you think we can handle ourselves and what do you think would be good to enlist pros for? Looking to simplify, but keep it nice.

Facing back - turned right

Facing back - turned left

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Comments (4)

PRO
Yardvaark
6 years ago
Mostly, pictures are only useful when they span an entire scene (as if we were there) and also include some of the house in the picture so we can see how house and yard relates. Most cameras won't take a picture with this much span so you must take it in slightly overlapping sections. Don't make the pictures into a computer generated panorama as it removes too much information and distorts. Take pictures when the lighting is good. When things are in dark shadows it's not clear what is what.
NHBabs z4b-5a NH
6 years ago
Live there for a year and see what is there before making major changes. It looks like the previous owner may have been a gardener, and until you've seen a full year cycle you may miss some plants that are only visible at certain times of the year. Learn to ID plants vs weeds (the Name that Plant forum will be handy.) Depending on what is there, you may find that it's easy care or that it's far too fussy for your tastes, but until you know what you have, it's difficult to make decisions.

What do you mean when you say "tree cleanup"? I wouldn't do any pruning of good-sized trees until you have had input from someone as to how to do that properly, and most IME trees don't need a huge amount of cleanup.
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Eric M.
Original Author
6 years ago
Thanks for the feedback. These pictures are much higher resolution on my computer, when I embed them they definitely lose a lot of quality. Point taken on the lighting it is certainly not the best. In the picture above the dark part has a tarp with some stone pieces in the ground and some scattered weeds and some sort of shrub/roots coming out of the ground.

I've got some more pictures here, although they will have similar quality issues:

Facing right against house

Facing left against house
Eric M.
Original Author
6 years ago
@NH babs - thank you for your feedback and thanks for the link! You can't see very well because of the pictures, but there are some tree branches in the back right corner by the fence. There was definitely a storm of some sort, as the previous owners had to replace the roof. The previous owner was definitely a gardener. We've seen a bush of what we think are azaleas pop up over the past week? Wonder what else could be hiding.

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