Podcast Ep.57: Landscaping to Sell, Garden Updates, a Surprising Salad + Cool Things

We love a how a bit of easy landscaping can transform a yard, and in this episode we talk about recent market research that confirms what you probably already knew – nice landscaping actually improves the sale price of your house. We list the easy things we did to transform the yard of our previous home before selling – without spending a lot of money. The farmhouse updates are all about the garden (of course – landscaping, right?). The food segment is all about an incredibly good celery salad (yes, celery!) and our cool things include homemade yogurt (that Brian made all my himself!) and the thing that’s literally saving our dog right now.

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Landscaping to Sell (or just enjoy!)

Believe it or not, you couldn’t even see where the front door was when we bought our previous house pictured above (Ha! Guess that didn’t stop us from buying – but we were looking for a fixer…). Making the front welcoming and inviting for visitors – and our family – was one of my priorities.

It’s nice to know from the following articles that it probably helped us get a good price for it when we sold!

Here are the articles Brian mentioned:

• Research from Zillow and Thumbtack about starting with outside things like paint and landscaping when getting ready to sell.
• And this from Clemson University which said improving curb appeal would increase your value 6 – 7%.

The book I mentioned with that great quote about the importance of beauty in our lives is Surprised By Hope by N.T. Wright. (I also reviewed this a bit more in this Good Things List.)

You can click on the following links to see what we did in our previous home to not only up it’s curb appeal, but blur the lines of when it was built by adding cottage character (including the before picture where you can’t find the door!):

• 5 Ways to Add Cottage Curb Appeal No Matter Your Home’s Age.
• 3 Easy Ways to Add Curb Appeal in Late Summer (includes the difference a simple washing down can make!).

The most basic things we did in the months before putting our home on the market probably made the biggest impact, and they don’t take a lot of DIY skills or lots of money:

1. Cutting all the shrubs and perennials back and then covering the soil with paper and mulch to make things look tidy (that link is to the video Brian mentioned with the Wall Street Journal…).
2. Washing the porch, walls and windows.
3. Filling pots with flowers.
4. Grading the gravel drive and adding more gravel where needed.
5. Touch-up paint on front door and trim.

Farmhouse Garden Updates

We’ve fully completed 6 raised beds (which we’re making and filling like this), and as you can see above have added the first layer of the 4 remaining beds. The rock wall bed is still waiting for more fill and the broken concrete bed for flowering shrubs is coming along. Everything takes so much time!!

I’ve also been plugging away at the huge mound by the manufactured home that I first shared about here. As you can see above, we’ve unearthed the full stump and plan to burn it when we’re home a full day. We also had to deal with a boulder neither of us could roll or move – even together. We ended up using a tow rope hooked to our car to move it a few feet to a place it could stay. Whew.

I can’t wait to have a demo day for that random brick wall, even if Brian thinks it’s “really well done!!”

What’s Cooking

So, you’ll have to listen (or read the transcript) in order to get the ingredients for that surprising celery salad we’re loving right now. It’s going to go up on the blog soon, so I don’t want to list it here before that – consider it a special early access for podcast listeners!

It really is a salad that takes most people by surprise, because who makes a salad with mainly celery? Trust me, it’s worth the time writing it down so you can get to making it!

This is Really Cool!

Brian’s: Instant Pot Yogurt! We used this recipe it turned out great, though it is a little thinner than store bought. We could let it drain a bit (that’s how to make Greek yogurt), but we’re haven’t bothered yet.

Jami’s: Traction Control Anti-Slip Dog Socks. These have made ALL the difference for our dog, Samson!! (FYI, I wrote this about him years ago – he’s still the sweetest thing.) It was terrible listening to him scramble and fall on our wood floors, waiting for him to really injure himself. And then he got all anxious and wouldn’t go certain places in our house. So sad.

Now he can walk around without slipping or falling – we can’t talk about these enough for dogs with the same issue! Also, I mentioned how turmeric has helped him through the years – here’s a link to that article and a video follow up.

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