In the world of design and décor, outdoor ‘rooms’ are becoming a phenomenon. While we may not enjoy the best weather, we can still enjoy our outdoor spaces by making the most with what we have. Springtime is the best time to spruce up your outdoor spaces as the flowers are blooming and the amount of sunlight we can enjoy is starting to increase. If you’re looking to enjoy the outdoors a bit more this year, follow these 5 steps and you can easily do so at home.

1. Fill & Flatten

The most important thing to do is to level out any unsightly bumps or rough patches you may have on your lawn. You want everything to be levelled in an aesthetically pleasing way. Now if you live on a hill, it’s understandable to have a slight incline but if you don’t and you have bumps that can easily be tripped over or holes that can be fallen into, you will need to level things out. Holes can easily be fixed–just fill with dirt, pack it in and you’re good to go. If you can easily find excess dirt in your yard that you can use to fill the hole, great! Problem solved. If not, you’ll need to buy fill dirt to cover the holes. A simple online search or trip to the home improvement store will easily deliver solutions for such a problem.

If you have bumps or mounds in your yard that needs flattening, a garden lawn roller is definitely the solution to your problem. Most garden lawn rollers can be filled with water and can flatten a lot of lawn lumps. Many garden rollers can easily be filled with water and work great. After use, you can dump the water, and store it away easily.

2. Patch things up

Is you’re lawn healthy? The next step is to make it so. If the grass is unhealthy, now is the time to determine why and what you can do to fix it. If you’ve got patches of dirt where grass should be and you don’t repair it, you’ll get weeds growing out of them later next spring. There are two basic ways of repairing bare patches in your yard. The easier way is to buy seed at your local gardening store and simply sprinkle the seed onto any bare patches you find. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the grass to grow, but it’s the easiest solution to bare patches. Remember to rake over the patch to clean off debris before sprinkling seed atop the patch.

The other option is to use sod and the cheapest way of finding sod is simply looking around your lawn and outdoor spaces for unwanted grass. If you find grass at the edge of your lawn or growing somewhere unnecessary, you can carefully pull it up and transplant it over the bare spot. If you can’t find any spare grass growing, you’ll have to buy some  sod at a home improvement store. Before transplanting the sod atop the bare spot, you’ll need to remove the dead top layer of soil. It’s rather easy to do, first take a spade and cut out the bare patch in shape of a square or rectangle. You’ll only want to cut an inch deep into the soil–too deep and you’ll make your lawn uneven. Remove the soil and place the sod atop the bare patch. Take a bit of soil, fertilizer or seed and sprinkle it around the border of the sod that you’ve placed on the patch and you’re all done.

3. Clean up the patio

Any surfaces in your yard that is not of grass and dirt should be cleaned up. That’s is as easy as sweeping your patio and watering down any marks, stains or dirt you might have on the pavement. If you’ve got concrete in the yard that’s exceptionally dirty, try using a pressure washer to get out stains and marks. Karcher pressure washers are renowned are patio cleaners that are renowned for their ease of use and for their effectiveness against stains and marks. They have reasonably priced patio cleaners that’ll have your patio looking brand new in no time. There really is no substitute for a patio that’s been pressure washed.

4. Plant plants

A visit to the gardening store will help you decide just which plants you’d love in your garden. Of course, before deciding take into consideration how high maintenance the plants are. If you choose plants that are indigenous to your region, chances are that you won’t need to worry too much about taking care of the plants. If you try to plant exotic flora, however, you’ll probably have a hard time keeping them looking beautiful and healthy. Keep that in mind when choosing plants for your garden and make sure you’ll have enough time and resources to take care of the plants you do choose, otherwise you’ll be wasting time and money.

5. Accessorize

And finally, don’t forget to add fun and functional furniture to your patio. Garden swing seats are my personal favourite. It’s fun, functional and looks great in your garden. The fun of swinging doesn’t seem to dissipate with age it seems, and a garden swing is perfect for adults and children a like. You can also add things like bird feeders, fountains and chairs to fill out your yard and make it a perfect outdoor room.

Did you know?

Different bird feeders attract different kinds of birds. The kind of birds you attract depends on the seeds you supply, the placement of the feeder and it’s design. If you’re planning on putting a bird feeder in your yard, familiarize yourself with the what types of birds live around your home and accordingly find out what kind of feeder you should get.

-Miljean

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