Know Your Landscape Functionality for Yard or Property After deciding the style of your landscape, next consider what you want the new landscape to do for your house and yard. The functionality of your landscape could be to create new areas for play and leisure, increase privacy, block the sun, wind or street noise ways, or to improve the view of your house. If you have large windows or French doors, think about how you can improve the views from the inside and bring the outside in. You may also want to improve views from a porch, patio or a deck. You can create an outdoor seating area if you don't already have one or change the size of an existing area to accommodate family and friends. A good plan is essential in landscaping...Without it, you'll end up wasting a lot of time and money. Landscaping is a lot of work and can cost a lot of money if not planned out properly at the beginning. For these reasons, most do-it-yourselfers go with a 3 to 5 year landscape plan. That way the work and cost can be spread out over a few years. At this point, you should know what style your landscape will be and what function it will perform for you. You also should have a good idea of what plants you want to incorporate in your plan. As a homeowner, look at where you spend most of your time and really focus on first enhancing the views from there. To keep the costs down, you can also try to re-use some of the plants in your existing landscape. Getting Started If you go with an independent designer, the plan could cost you up to a couple hundred dollars. Battinelli Landscaping & Garden Center will provide you with a free consultation if you're buying our plants. You can draw up your own landscape plan since the basic principles of landscape design are not that complex. But there are a lot of things to consider so you might want to have a landscape pro look over your plan before you start on it. You'll need graph paper to draw out your plan. We use the kind with the grids laid out in eighth-inch scale. You'll need to measure out the size of your lot, plus the dimensions of your house. You'll also need a pretty good idea of where the house sits in the yard in relation to the boundaries of the property. To be exact, measure from one corner of the house to a couple landmarks like a corner of the yard or a gate.  TIP: We've learned to use tracing paper over our basic yard drawing at this point so you don't have to re-draw it over and over again. Battinelli Landscaping & Garden Center...Full Service Landscape Contractors 1611 Greenwood Lake Tpke • Hewitt, New Jersey   •  Open 7 Days A Week •  Garden Ctr Hours: M-F 9-5 • Sat 8-5 • Sun 9-4