So you bought your dream Home, now what?

You bought your dream home, now what?

Start tackling renovation on the inside of your home, regardless of the season, and resist the temptation to do major changes in the garden until you have lived there for one full year. Why, you might ask? Good question! Because the inside of your home will often keep you busy for a few weeks, or even months, and it is often better to concentrate on one area at a time, rather than doing a multitude of tasks half heartedly.

However, the main reason for this is that you will be able to make wiser choices, as far as what to plant and where, and what to tear out, cut down, or transplant, after you had a chance to get to know your yard/property.

I learned this lesson the hard way: When I was a young mother, we moved clear across the State and because my husband started a job in a new field there was no “work history.” Hence, we did not get credit, no matter that we had a sizeable amount of cash for a down payment. Therefore we were forced to buy what we could get, and ‘Owner Financed’ home. It was small, really way to small for our large family, and it was ugly; needless to say that I was eager to transform this ugly duckling into a white swan as soon as possible. I made many mistakes in this endeavor. For example: I chopped down a large overgrown bush in the front yard to only 1-foot height. I found out 3 years later, when it had recovered from my butcher job and bloomed for the first time, that it was a gorgeous white fragrant lilac.

Another motive to wait on yard renovation are bulbs. If you dig around in the ground, you might destroy the Spring show of tulips, daffodils, crocuses, and hyacinths that lies in wait to surprise and amaze you, the new owner.

Yet more reasons to wait on major landscaping is to observe light patterns, ground conditions, and possible intrusions and interferences by neighbors and/or their pets, (you don’t want to plant your prized peony collection in an area that is “Fido’s” favorite digging spot, or plant tulips only to find that the ground holds to much water in the winter, which will cause the bulbs to rot.

These rules of observing light patterns, and other changes, hold true for the inside of your home as well. When picking paint colors, for example, you want to make sure that you like the color as much during a sunny day as you do in the evening by candlelight. Color is greatly affected by light, but also by other color. Yes, that’s right, color affects color. If you hold a red paint swatch next to a mahogany dresser, the red swatch will bring out the red tones in the mahogany wood, versus a purple swatch, which pulls out the purple and black tones from the wood.