Backyard Design

This week for our backyard landscaping project I realized before I could do anything I needed to come up with a plan and a design of what I wanted my backyard to look like. After walking the backyard many times and chatting with my fiancé where we both suggested many different things we had ideas of what we wanted it to look like. The main thing I kept going back to is that I wanted it to be practical for our future with starting a family eventually and wanted it to be a safe place for kids. I want as much grass as we can have with lots of soft space to run around and things that won’t get wrecked by kids or things they would have to worry about breaking. 

This year we aren’t in a financial state to completely finish our backyard but it was nice to come up with a plan and a vision of what we would like it to eventually like to look like. I started by walking around the backyard and measuring the fences, deck, house & trees. With this information I drew it out our backyard on a piece of paper with all the measurements. Then I realized it was hard to visualize what we had thought about on a piece of paper. 

I realized that there is probably a website or app out there that could help me to visualize all this. Many of the websites that said they were free I would use for about 30 seconds and then they tried to charge me. I then came upon Gardena, which I could design my whole backyard on this website with no charges. 

I enjoyed that this website was easy to use and navigate. I was able to put the exact measurements of the house, the fence, the trees. I enjoyed that I was able to design my yard how it is now and then add items into the yard like flower beds, hot tub, raspberry bushes & grass. This website also gave me an idea of how large of an area I was going to be putting grass and gravel. 

                                   

Our Backyard Now                                                                   Our Backyard Vision

While this website was pretty great I did have a few challenges with it. I wish there were more options for different plants or trees to put in my yard, where I just had to pick the closest one to what I wanted and use my imagination. I also found it confusing using some of the controls and thought the website was glitching at one point and realized I had switched to view mode not editing. Overall even though I had these challenges with the site I would use it again and found it nice to see a visual of our vision.