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Landscape Design

First time home owner, what to do first?

8 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)

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Yardvaark
8 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
8 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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Yup, that's the place. My parents still live there, though their house is worth more than their cars, LOL! The whole area has been depressed for years...the old folks are dying off and the young ones (the ones with any ambition, anyhow) move away to a more prosperous area. Now the immigrants (both legal and illegal) are moving there because of the cheap housing and finally getting some life back into the city (the downtown was a ghost town for the 20 years I lived there - now it has lots of hispanic shops and restaurants) but the old-timers don't like it because...well...they're racist. I'll admit that it HAS been a tremendous drain on the already-not-so-hot school system -- they have had to hire a huge number of ESL teachers because they suddenly have all these non-English speaking students enrolling. Still, I'd bet most of the Hispanics in town are legal - people are just going after the "illegals" as a way to try to force all the Hispanic people out of the city -- I guess so it can go back to being an economically-depressed ghost town. I'm just glad I got the heck out of there! (jeez, I hope nobody from Hazleton reads this board!)
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Since your in MN and spring weather is just hitting with the snow finally leaving, there are a few things you can do as the sun starts to be out longer and temps warm up. First priority would be getting on the leaves and sticks out of the yard so it's not smothering the turf. Depending how many leaves/sticks this could be done a few ways. You might need to stick to rakes and blowers instead of a mow and bag. Either way, once the yard is cleaner take a look at the ground, it might be so compact and shady that just throwing seed down won't help much. If you're really serious about getting fuller and thicker turf, you might be be best having a local company that takes care of turfs recommend a course of action for you which could include spring aeration and seeding, and maybe fertilizer. If the soil isn't to bad though it might just need some seed and maybe some fertilizer. It's still relatively early landscaping season in MN, the grass just turned green here in central Iowa within the last two weeks. So you should be able to do some work to get things looking better before grasses really start to kick in.
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You probably would want to post in the Lawn Care (or whatever they call it) forum. And possibly in the regional forum that applies to NC, as both those would be more specifically related to your questions than would Landscape Design. You said you put down pre-emergent, but didn't mention applying any fertilizer. Lawns need it for greenup & growth, especially when irrigation systems are washing nitrogen out of the soil on an ongoing basis. Likely, you'll need pre-emerge 2x per year; there are winter weeds as well as summer ones. A post-emergent herbicide for centipede lawns (you'll need to check labels) will probably help you out with any broadleaved weeds. For grassy weeds you may need to dig them out (use a spading fork, not a shovel) and be sure to prevent their reoccurence in the future.
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This is such an interesting question. We are also DIYers and bought property to build our own house on. We even talked about doing it a decade ago and it didn’t work out. Can I say I’m SO GLAD it didn’t work out when we were younger and less experienced homeowners? We did what @cpartist said - bought a fixer upper (two, actually) and lived in them for the last decade, fixing them as we go and learning technical skills, space planning, where to splurge and where to cut costs, etc. If we had built right away a decade ago we would have had a MUCH INFERIOR house over what we can build now. From a living standpoint and fit and finish, both. Currently we are in the second fixer upper as our temporary/investment property that we are fixing and living in during the build we will start next year. This gives us a staging ground so he time pressure is off us to get it done faster than we can afford. It’s also let us test out everything from cabinetry join methods to drywall finish, tile setting, pulling new wire and redoing an electrical panel, multiple types of plumbing and HVAC repairs and installs, even furniture building and cut/install of molding and trim. This is our low stakes test house. And we can rent or sell it once we move, so sweat equity will pay dividends that will help cover our mortgage costs for the new place. I highly recommend doing it this way. Life and priorities change over the years, as do skills and finances. There is a reason even most of us diehard DIYers don’t start out with the ‘dream house build’ :)
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Eric M.
Original Author
8 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
8 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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