Winterizing Our Landscaping
It never ceases to amaze how quickly the year flies by. At one point, we’re ringing in the first day of summer, and poof! Winter is almost here. With so much rain and snow already making an appearance all over Utah, it is wise to turn one’s attention to winterizing our yard design.
Now, what exactly does winterizing mean? While it means something different to different people, particularly in the details, the basic concept remains the same: preparing our homes for harsher conditions brought about by cold weather. This manifests in different ways:
- Insulating all exposed plumbing
- Turning off the water main if the house will be vacant
- Caulking broken windows that let in the cold
- Replacing air filters
- Unblocking outside air vents
While this is all very needful, especially for summer homes and cabins that won’t have a lot of visitors in the winter, a whole other set of steps must be taken to ensure your landscaping is ready for winter. Your yard is usable year-round and taking a few steps now will keep you warm in the yard on the coldest days.
A Room with a View
Of all the services that Cottonwood Landscapes handles, creating a social space in the yard for friends and family to gather remains our most-requested job. Over the next few paragraphs, we’ll show you how we do that. The first way to create a space where people will want to congregate is to literally build a special area that didn’t exist previously.
This is usually done in one of two ways, (or both, if you have the space and inclination):
- Build a separate building altogether, like a cottage, A-frame, or even a furnished shed, somewhere on the property.
- Create a patio, preferably with a fixed cover coming out from the main house.
Our team has built it all, from extra storage areas to workshops for the “doer” in the family. Not only will this type of addition keep your outdoor furniture dry and add value to your home, but it creates a sense of progression to an evening with friends (“let’s repair to the patio!”) and evokes a touch of the fairy tale to your property. A lovely meeting area, expressly built for those closest to you, is a great way to stay warm inside and out, this winter.
Fire is our Friend
Another way to keep the winter nights on the right side of cozy is to make fire readily available out of doors. A beautifully designed fire installation lets us feel like we’ve landed in the sweet spot in between the warring elements of hot and cold. Typically, we can add fire to your yard design in a few ways:
- Create a fire pit, around which you can circle yourselves and talk, roast hot dogs, or make smores.
- Install an outdoor fireplace, a feature that has been skyrocketing in popularity for years now.
- Set up a network of lanterns in a beautiful display of outdoor lighting. When it comes to the aesthetic of lights, we have plenty of styles to choose from.
Fire has long been our companion in the cold winter nights but now that we don’t need to huddle around it for survival we can begin exploring its potential as a landscaping feature.
First Class Design
No matter how you decide to winterize your property — either through fire, shelter, or some other type of windbreak or retaining wall — every installation Cottonwood Landscapes creates will be done according to the highest possible standard of landscape design. If you’re interested in exploring your own yard’s potential, give us a call today and we’ll get your home all ready for those frigid winter days.
