Planning to sell your house? Consider the landscape around, for the pleasant surrounding adds 5 to 10 per cent to the value of your house. If you interested in improving the outside view of your household, the tips that follow are for you.

If you plan to sell your house in a short period of time (1 year or less):

1. Edge the flower beds to create new neat curves. If the bushes are overgrown, take time to widen the beds (up to 2 feet), which will make the bushes look smaller.

2. Cut and nourish the grass regularly. You should start using fertilizers (if you haven’t done it before) at least a year before you plan to sell the house, so that the grass covering is equally thick and attractive.

3. Add more colour to your yard. You can plant flowers that blossom the whole growing season such as petunias, impatiens or other small annuals.

4. You should necessarily have at least several perennials or shrubs that are up to 4 feet high, they will add a big deal to the attractiveness of your yard.

If you plan to sell your house in a more distant future:

1. Think of what will turn out of the plants that are currently on your yard. While some plants such as azaleas, forsythia, hollies and rhododendrons will flower again and again every year or every other year, there are such plants as yews or junipers, which don’t produce new leaves on the old wood and may have to be completely removed if they overgrow.

2. Take care about the leafage in your yard. The correctly chosen big plants may improve the appearance of your house greatly. You may profit from combining the green-leaves trees or plants with the eye-catching patch of black-eyed Susans, a flowering crabapple or a cutleaf Japanese maple. The advantage of planning to sell the house not immediately is obvious, since you don’t have to buy the big trees (and spend two times as much money); instead, you can buy smaller plants and wait several seasons until they grow.

3. Look from different perspective on the arrangement of the flower beds and tree planting. When you scatter the flowers around your property, and not along the foundation and the property lines, you will create a visual depth of field, and your house will look further away from the road. For example, it is nice to plant some flowers near the corners of your house to emphasize its shape, some near the street to define the yard and some in between to block any unpleasant view and create neat atmosphere.

4. Backyard should remain private even if you are in good relations with the neighbours (perspective buyers will definitely like to have it fenced). If you don’t want to arrange fence there, you can use evergreen bushes along the property line, which will serve two purposes: esthetic and separating.