Nothing says it's Spring like quite like yard work. While not everyone can afford a home, most people who can, can't afford to pay someone to do work for them, so they have to do it themselves. It's so much more satisfying to when you know your blood, sweat and tears went into it, amirite?
Whenever you buy a house, getting a home inspection is the smart thing to do. Ours was filled with minor issues. Perfect, knock 5 figures off the listing price, request that they fix some of the things and tackle the rest one by one.
Minor damage to vinyl siding...call a qualified contractor, I don't think so. A Qualified contractor would charge a few hundred dollars. This is one of the first things we fixed, last summer. There was some extra vinyl siding in the rafters of the garage, we didn't even have to buy or paint it, not that white is a difficult colour to find.
Step 1: Buy a $10 tool from Home Depot or some other hardware store.
Step 2: Locate broken siding.
Seems like someone was doing some aggressive weed whacking.
Step 3: Get some matching siding and cut it down to size. You can cut this stuff with scissors or a utility knife.
Step 4: Remove the broken siding.
They connect with some plastic lip, the tool is designed to slide under it and pull it down. It won't work everywhere so slide it along to make sure you are somewhere with a little give. Don't break a good piece of siding and if it's a long piece cut it before removing it so you only have to replace a few feet of the stuff.
Step 6: Cut it to the proper size.
I kept the old stuff for reference to make similar cuts.
Step 7: Slide put it in the correct spot making sure it's connected to the piece below and hammer it in. Pro tip, don't hammer a nail into the hole all the way or it could buckle. Those holes are long so it can slide a little, under the head of the nail. Re-use the nails from the pieces you take off.
That's it.
Oh wait, more work...
Correct slope with qualified landscaper? Someone qualified to put dirt somewhere demands such a high salary, I can't afford it. but where to get some dirt?
Please note: The lack of curb appeal got us a significant discount. Paint the fence, it was one panel visible from the road! Remove the weeds or whack them down and let the grass get a nicer colour before you sell a house.
A couple hundred dollars spent on basic landscaping can net you thousands of dollars. Look at this, the pictures were taken one year apart. They had some hideous overgrown random bushes, weeds and dirt under the cantilever overhang.
I dug up the bushes and put some of the excess dirt in the holes around the house to make the slope away from the foundation. Found some cleaner looking shrubs that grow okay in shade and don't like water. Yew should work.
I reused the plastic that was there and put down some landscaping cloth to stop the worst of the weeds.
Added some attractive rocks and had to make an extra trip to get a little more. We will trim those bushes next spring and the grass should heal, it's come a long way.
The last major bit of yard work we did this spring was to place a path between the fence and the garage. There was some mud and the area gets enough traffic to ruin the grass. The stones are easy to install, just make sure they don't wobble. There used to be gravel here that were covered by an inch of dirt, which made digging fun.
With the excess dirt, I made sure to get the rest of the low areas around the house. That's enough landscaping and outdoor chores for one spring. Time to just work on getting the grass to grow, it was an overgrown weed garden with dirt patches. Next year, we are going to pressure wash the fence, deck, trim and put in a concrete path at the front.
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