The Do's and Don'ts of Summer Outdoor Staging for Your Waterloo Region Home
The summer can be a great time to sell a Waterloo Region home. Thanks to the warmer weather, potential home buyers are a little more inclined to get out and devote a weekend – or a summer evening – to viewing homes for sale and attending open houses, it’s easier for sellers to get out of the house and let their real estate agent show their home in peace and for families seeking a new home before a new school year begins this is the perfect time to buy.
The arrival of summer also means that the curb appeal a home boasts, in terms of its outdoor space and landscaping, can really be shown off to its best advantage. For that to be the case though home sellers do have to pay a little more attention to staging and maintaining their gardens, and gardening can be a little trickier to get right in the summer.
Unless you are very short on time or have a lot of property to deal with, you don’t have to panic and hire a gardener for the season. Here are some summer landscaping dos and don'ts that even the gardening impaired can use to their advantage when selling their Waterloo Region home.
Summer Landscaping Dos
DO Feed the Grass
Give your lawn a hand as it tries to cope with the summer heat by keeping it well fed. A lush, green lawn is a magnet for many home buyers, and it’s not something that can be used as a draw in the colder months so make the most of the opportunity now.
Your local garden centre should have a good selection of fertilizers to suit your lawn type and if you’re not sure what that is there are usually friendly experts on hand to help you figure it out. We also wrote extensively about just this issue here.
Once you’ve chosen your fertilizer, apply it according to the label instructions and try to avoid spreading it on days when the temperatures top 32C (90F)
DO Add Some Instant Colour
Summer landscape staging is all about striking visuals. While you are at the garden centre look out for plants and shrubs that are partially grown as they can be used to add an instant shot of colour and visual interest to your outdoor space.
Great choices include asters, dahlias, begonias, and marigolds, as they are all very bright and colourful while also great at standing up to the summer heat.
DO Stage an Outdoor Dining Space
Even if you rarely have the time or inclination to dine outside the possibility of doing so is something that will ignite many a Waterloo Region home buyer's imagination, so staging an outdoor dining space is a must.
It does not have to be complex, a simple bistro set and a little solar lighting can be every bit as effective as a fancier outdoor dining table or full outdoor kitchen.
Summer Landscaping Don’ts
DON’T Scalp Your Lawn
If you want to get that lush green look for your lawn cutting it to within a centimetre of its life every few days is not actually the right way to go about things. Short cuts mean less drought-tolerance, patchier growth, more weeds and shallow roots. To prevent potential damage to the grass you should cut off no more than one-third of its current height during any mowing session.
DON’T Let Weeds Go to Seed
Weeds can spring up fast even in the most meticulously maintained garden, but they should not be allowed to take hold and should certainly never be allowed to go to seed, as if they do the seeds will quickly spread all over your landscape, creating a real headache and a lot of extra work.
Add weeding to your weekly list of home maintenance tasks and to be most effective rely on a purpose-built weeding tool rather than haphazard hand pulling.
DON’T Get Over Ambitious
Some flowers, plants, and shrubs, as beautiful as they can be, are also rather hard to take care of in the summer. Unless you have the time and expertise to deal with harder to cultivate choices like roses and ferns give them a miss while your home is up for sale.
Another reason not to get too ambitious is that while lots of homebuyers do indeed have outdoor space high on their wants list they often worry that they will take on something they can't keep up with. If you can 'stage' and showcase your home's outdoor space as attractive and easy to maintain it will become an even stronger selling point.
