Curb appeal landscaping project – Part 1 – Estimation

Why is it a good idea add a landscaping project to your front lot?

in our introductory post we wrote a little about the reasons for a curb appeal face lift. There are a few reasons:

• Improving home value
• Adding a sense of style to your home
• Bringing character to the neighborhood

You might find more, but as we noted, properly appointed landscaping can increase your home’s value by 5% – 20%

As for making this a budget friendly curb appeal project, well, when it comes right down to it, you just don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on this sort of thing.

Enough about why, let’s get down to how much

With some good planning and efficient use of space and resources, you don’t need to spend a fortune landscaping your property . Like with any project, the first step is estimating how much time we need to allot and how much this little endeavor will cost to be able to save up and carve out the needed hours. To get there, we need to know, roughly, what tools and materials (and plants) we’ll need.  From there, we can figure out ordering, pickup, and installation times. As usual we’ll break down our resources into a couple of categories.

• Tools
• Building & planting components
• Plants & seeds
• Labor

Before we dive right in, we need to know the goals and constraints for the project

Up front, we set a top end budget of $500. Experts will tell you this is very inexpensive (and probably not achievable) when it comes to a curb appeal landscaping project.  So here are the knowns:

• Since we’re doing the work ourselves, labor is essentially free, which cuts costs substantially.
• The area for the curb appeal project is roughly 40′ x 22′ and has some existing plantings.
  • It’s important to incorporate the existing landscaping into our plan since a) there’s nothing wrong with them and b) keeping the existing plantings will save on cost.
• The current landscape does present some drainage issues in heavy rains or snow melts, so we will factor dealing with that into our overall plan.
• As a goal, grass will be an accent rather than a main feature.
• For plantings we want to opt for season long perennials and evergreens, to mix with the current deciduous and early, mid, and late bloomers.
• There need to be paths for foot traffic from the driveway and from the street. Oh – and did we mention lighting? We’ll need to deal with that too.

The big picture

Taking advice from the Covey book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People “Start with the end in mind”, meaning, it’s easier to put a puzzle together when you’ve seen the picture on the front of the box. So, knowing the start and end points are very helpful when estimating. So here’s a not so flattering picture of what we have to start with. the overall picture is missing some details, but its not a bad point of reference.  Now there’s nothing really wrong here. the lawn is neat, the garden box and planters are full.  Overall, it’s generally clean and simple.

A rough pencil drawing helps figure out where the new components will be and gives us an inventory of the whole build”

A very rough scale (in this case 1 inch for 5 feet) helps figure quantities and measurements for estimation.  In this case a few items are left blank (like what kinds of plantings and specific materials for the walkways as those will be items for research.  Doing another drawing to show how the elevation will look when the curb appeal project is done is a nice to have for presentation purposes, but that can be done later. Look for more pictures in the upcoming curb appeal project installments. Feel free to comment on this post if you have questions about the sketch.

Brain on fire yet? Hopefully not, but if it is, don’t worry. We’re only taking stock, not actually doing the project just yet. So let’s work from the above and see what we can make out as a list of necessities, we’ll worry about quantities later.

• Tools
  • Wheel barrow
  • Shovel
  • Rake
  • Tiller
• Building & planting components
  • Weed barrier
  • Mulch
  • Edging
  • Street path
  • Low voltage or solar path lighting
  • Driveway path
• Plants & seeds
  • Evergreen Shrub (holly / eunymous / bamboo)
  • Flowering perennials

Tools

for this project we have all the tools we need, and after doing a quick review, they’re all healthy enough for the job. Nothing needs to be fixed or replaced, so we can tick these off our list straight away.

Building & planting components

Now we have to figure out some quantities. We already know that our planned space is 40 x 22 or 880 square feet. We do want to keep some grass in the garden for accent, so lets figure 80% of the total and round that to 700 square feet for the total area.

Weed barrier: Fabric, mulch or both?

Fabric:

Can we talk about weed fabric for a quick second? There are pros and cons here. For a lot of people, weed control fabric has been the way to keep your garden weed free. And there are plenty of breathable products on the market that claim to be safer for the environment. On the other hand it’s not the only way, and it’s not really good for the soil, or at best is only a short term solution. In the long term, as the mulch decomposes, the weeds will find a way.  Since the environment is an important factor, it doesn’t add too much to the overall maintenance of the build, and excluding weed fabric reduces the cost… let’s consider it excluded.

Mulch:

Since the build will use mulch as a natural weed barrier, depth will be an important factor. Weeds can be stubborn, so a minimum of 2 inches of something heavy, will be needed. 700 square feet translates to  a little more than 4 cubic yards at 2 inches. Our local mulch dealer has a minimum of 5 cubic yards. Honestly, we can use the extra, so 5 it is. If you’re thinking, oh just get those bags when they go on sale – no way. those mulch bags are usually only 2 cubic feet, and with 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard, you’re talking almost 70 bags. Okay, so they’ll be a little cheaper than getting it delivered but you’re just wasting time at that point.

Cost:

Budget $200 for good quality mulch delivered from a local dealer.  Installing mulch doesn’t take much time once the area is tilled prepped and pitched.

Effort:

Lets figure, generously, a day to prep (including re-pitching for drainage) and another half day to install the mulch.  Realistically it won’t take that long, but unforeseen circumstances occur so let’s account for that

Walkways

Edging helps keep the mulch in place and from spilling out onto the lawn. It’s possible to go multiple ways. On one hand, stone edging looks nice is durable and is natural. On the other hand is a rubber or plastic barrier which kind of blends and is a little less expensive.  The third option is to use a natural embankment, effectively digging the edge of the mulched area deeper and at an angle to the soil around it forcing the dirt to form a natural barrier.  This last option looks the most natural but does add a little extra maintenance in edging… it’s also the no cost option, and our choice. It’s an even trade off between mowing a front lawn or edge trimming a garden of this size.

A path to the mailbox from the front door is part of the overall requirement. the front steps are about 20 feet from the mailbox for this part of the build we’re going to use ground contact decking boards.

Cost:

The average price for building materials fluctuates on a daily basis, so, we have to go by current pricing, and add some room for error. Using an average price just north of $1 per square foot, a nice path that would accommodate two people shoulder to shoulder would be about 4 feet wide, or 80 square feet (20×4)for a total of $80.  Adding $20 to the budget for this item gives a little room if the prices change.

Effort:

The path needs to be stable and safe to walk on so taking some extra time here to make it right is important. Three days ought to give enough time for this task. A path from the driveway across the yard to the front steps is also a must. We happen to have some nice irregularly shaped slate flagstone left over from another project that will add some texture and character to the build and, help to cut costs. We’re only moving and setting some flagstone here so a couple hours ought to give plenty of time for this one.

Lighting

Lighting is sort of a big deal. In a landscape design like this one, its not only for the purpose of being able to see the walkways at night, but also, to accentuate the landscape and home.  Path lighting should be bright enough to see but also not so bright as to annoy the neighborhood. Floods and spotlights can help show off specimens and highlight roof lines and steps. Gone are the days of changing bulbs and hiding wires. The innovations of low cost solar power and powerful LED lighting have solved these problems. That said, quality impacts cost. Some short term savings can be had by using inexpensive lighting. So, when it comes right down to it, going the route of lowest cost for the best looking product.

Cost:

It looks right now (before the spring sales start) that $3 – $5 per light is a good.  Casting  about 4 Square feet per light we need 10 for the path from the house to the mailbox and another 10 from the driveway to the front door.  3 flood lights will help highlight the main landscaping elements and another 2 will accentuate the house. Using the lower end for the path lighting and higher end for the floods sets our lighting budget at $85.

Effort:

Lighting is more about planning than work. Especially with solar.  This should end up being less than an hour of actual build time, so let’s include that as part of the planting step.

Plants & seeds

Landscaping need plants to bring it all together. The existing landscape has two ornamental dwarf maples one red and one silver that are well established and healthy. There is also an existing perennial bed that blooms from spring to fall. The front porch is flanked by two large healthy daisy plants that need to be cut back and split. Finally, irises of every color are available on the property. Adding a medium height evergreen shrub between the maples will keep balance and provide some color during the winter months.  Flowering perennials in and around the trees will liven things up even more during the warmer months. Starting with a slightly larger shrub will mean a shorter amount of time until it grows into the garden.

Cost:

Setting aside $50 is a good benchmark. Splitting off the daisies will give two late season bloomers. There are also irises all over the property that we can split from and add early season bloomers. Setting aside $25 will give enough budget to cover the time in between.

Effort:

This is a little more than digging a hole and sticking in a few plants.  The main shrub will take a bit of work and splitting those iris and daisy plants will take some time. Since we’re also covering the lighting install here, lets plan a whole day of the curb appeal project caring for the leaf babies (that sounds like a very fun day)

Bottom line time and cost estimation for our curb appeal landscaping project

All that work to get to the bottom line using round figures.

From a timing investment perspective, not accounting for planting

Timing for our curb appeal project starts…. now

We’ve got a ton of other outdoor planting and gardening tasks that are time based.  Veggies need to go in the ground in the beginning of May, and there are a bunch of spring cleanups that need to get done before that can happen. So, we need to be efficient about this project because if we’re not careful, the front lot will be torn up for too long and the neighbors will be lined up with their torches and pitch forks. There are things we can start now for this project, Including getting a good solid plan in place.

Next steps

Now that we know all the stuff we need to do, the next step in this project is to break everything down into a schedule that just sucks the fun right out of everything… uh… er… sets us up for success. This is key for this project, since we have a lot of other things going on and want to make sure we don’t spread ourselves too thin. As usual, planning is a much shorter process toward our curb appeal project than all this estimating and will be continued in our next project post. Till then, if you have any questions, feel free to register and comment or reach out to @leafbabies on twitter.