You can easily upgrade your kerb appeal with less drastic changes, including tons of easy-to-implement landscaping elements. Many people think of landscaping as permanent changes that have to be designed by a professional. However, adding greenery and other elements is a great way to update your property without going overboard. Potted plants, small accents and coloured mulch can change the entire feel of your garden!

1. Add Cohesive Planters Throughout Your Front Garden

All of your pots and planters don’t have to match exactly, but you can choose containers for your greenery that help tie everything together. Unify your path, porch and mailbox with complementary pots. Coordinated pots can even help bring neglected corners of your front garden to life. Choose a few colours, shapes and materials that work well together, as well as with your home’s colour and style, and the plants you’d like to use. Consider choosing classic terra cotta paired with galvanized metal. For a more modern look, mix concrete planters and shiny metallics.

2. Let Your Decor do Double Duty

Choose decorations for your front garden that also serve a purpose. Think pretty watering cans, matching hand tools and a weather-proof basket to store them in. Even if you don’t keep these items outside all the time, this way they won’t be off-putting to passersby if you forget to bring them into the shed after weeding or watering. Choose a watering can that will look at home among your planters, is big enough to water pots outside the reach of your hose and small enough that you can carry it when full!

3. Install a Wandering Path

Laying stones to connect different areas of your front garden will look nice and protect your grass in high-traffic areas. It’s not difficult to install a path yourself, especially with flat stones from a local garden center or quarry. Choosing stones instead of pavers will allow your path to look great, even if the stones are a little misshapen and not lined up perfectly. Line the path with a permanent flower bed, or let it stand on its own.

4. Plant a Vegetable Garden

What if your landscaping could also be part of dinner? Tomatoes, green beans, squash and herbs are all easy to grow, even in large planters or raised beds. No matter what size your garden is, veggies add colour, texture and a variety of heights without too much maintenance. Plus, you can add them to just about any summer meal!

5. Mulch Flower Beds with Bold Colours

You can change the entire look of your landscaping by choosing a different colour of mulch. Very light or very dark mulch helps greenery stand out and unifies different flower beds throughout your property. Make sure to choose an option that’s free of harmful dyes to keep kids and pets safe. Mulch is also a great way to keep flower beds weed-free and save water, especially in warm summer months.

6. Choose Interesting Rocks for a Maintenance-Free Statement

Big rocks with unique shapes add diversity to your landscaping, and you don’t even need thumbs to care for them, let alone a green thumb! Whether you find rocks meant for landscaping at your local garden centre or accidentally dig a few up when planting other areas of your front garden, it’s not hard to choose a collection of stones and arrange them among greenery.

Have you recently upgraded your kerb appeal with landscaping? Let me know how you did it in the comments below!

The post 7 Simple Ways to Upgrade your Kerb Appeal with Landscaping appeared first on Twits Guides.

It is therefore important to remember that it is all good and well having an up to date kitchen, bathroom or a trendy wooden floor which you can use to impress visitors but if the first thing they see if a scruffy and neglected front garden the overall impression you are trying to make will be lost at the front path.

With this in mind one of the most cost effective home improvement projects you can complete to transform the exterior of your home is to install a set of eye catching wrought iron style gates and railings in a design appropriate to your homes existing architecture. Not only will they look great, they will also offer many other benefits to the homeowner which we will now look at in more detail below.

Enhanced Levels of Security

To keep your home well protected from the threat of criminals and trespassers the installation of a set of driveway gates across the vehicle access point and a smaller single gate at the front pedestrian entrance is an excellent investment. Not only will you be able to control who can enter the property but you will also be able to stop small children and pets from escaping from the safe confines of the garden or driveway which is especially useful if you live on a busy road.

Additional Privacy

If you like to spend time outdoors but suffer from nosy neighbours or have lots of people passing by the boundary of your property the addition of a gate with a solid back panel will be a great option as it will prevent people from seeing through any break in the fence line or boundary wall.

Added Kerb Appeal

The addition of a set of wrought iron style gates and railings will make a magnificent statement at the front of your home provided you choose the correct design.

Define Key Areas of the Garden

If you need to control access to certain areas of the garden a gate will act as an effective barrier. Examples of this could be if you have small children and need to keep them away from a pond or have a pet you need to stop getting on the grass.

Low Levels of Maintenance

Unlike timber which will rot if not maintained on a regular basis gates and railings constructed from solid steel components require little maintenance making them perfect for the modern lifestyle where time always seems to be at a premium.

So now we have looked the benefits of installing metal gates and railings how do you go about choosing the right ones to suit your home?

Selecting the Design

Choosing the right gate or railing design may seem confusing due to the huge range of options however in reality it is rather simple. Just take a look at the existing features of the property and match the railings to suit. For example, a modern home will benefit from an uncluttered design whilst a period home will likely have more decorative features such as corbelled brickwork, cast iron downpipes etc and would therefore suit a more decorative style. So if you are unsure what to go for always follow this simple principle and you won`t go far wrong.

Getting the Size Right

If you are proficient at DIY and feel you could install a set of gates yourself it is important to get the size right. To do this measure the distance between posts or brickwork and this becomes the ordering size. When doing this the old adage “measure twice cut once” is worth remembering as mistakes with measurements can prove costly if you get it wrong. Alternatively if you don’t feel comfortable fitting the gates or railings yourself the best route is to speak with a specialist installation company or general builder as these types of trades will be able to carry out the job with their eyes shut.

To conclude, the next time you are spending money on internal furnishings or carrying out yet more needless decorating why not take a look out of the window and consider what improvements you could be making to the exterior of your property. By seeing the garden as an additional room that cannot afford to be wasted you can create an equally attractive statement outside your home that will really impress friends and neighbour`s.

The ideas and advice within this article on how to enhance the exterior of your home have been supplied by  www.metalgatesdirect.co.uk, a leading UK supplier of affordable wrought iron style gates and railings suitable for any residential property.

The post Choose Gates & Railings to Enhance the Exterior of Your Home appeared first on Twits Guides.