Bringing dinner outside, sitting with friends hanging out, kids playing around… decks are an extension of your home. These deck maintenance tips will help you maintain your deck so you can enjoy it for years. In central Iowa, we aren’t able to use a deck all year round, which makes it even more important to […]

Let’s start with our title: “6 questions to create an ideal fire pit.” What is ideal??? An ideal fire pit means what’s right for YOU. We don’t believe in cookie-cutter designs around here, and every home is different.  These tips will help you figure out what would be the ideal fire pit at your home. […]

WHAT EVEN IS AN OUTDOOR KITCHEN? In Iowa, we are cooped up half the year. While the weather is pleasant, we want to be outside as much as possible.  I get a lot of questions about outdoor kitchen design – what’s needed? How do you plan? To help you get started, I want to teach […]

Every pathway should get you from point A to point B. That’s the lowest bar. I think it’s not a path if it doesn’t! Really, the journey is what matters. You can tell when you’re on a well-designed pathway. It has a purpose. Its shape, layout and materials all support that purpose. We can create […]

When working with clients on a landscape design, I balance so many different things. We want an instant landscape, but we need to watch the budget. We want low maintenance plantings, but we want instant gratification. I often remind my clients that landscapes take time to grow. Just about every picture on Pinterest or Houzz is […]

Plenty of us have garden beds with plants in them, walkways to our front doors, and patios out back. Yep – nothing particularly special or earth-shattering. Maybe your front walkway and the skinny beds around it are weed-free, but not impressive. Maybe the garden bed out your back door has some nice colorful blooms in […]

I am pretty serious about making your front entry beautiful. This is how we welcome our friends and family, give a preview of our style, and create the vibe for what it’s like at your house. Chances are, you’re into making your front entry lovely too – there are entire TV shows about curb appeal! […]

So you just invested half a million dollars or more into a new home – a brand new home. You’re in a nice housing development near a school and close to major roads, so you can get downtown super easily. You picked out all the details- the light fixtures, flooring, counters… it all feels like a […]

Clients frequently ask me how much of their home’s value they should spend on landscaping. There isn’t a great rule of thumb for that question – it is a hard one to answer with any real certainty, because we need to drill down into a number of things: what your real estate market is like, how […]

Anyone out there live in a brand-new house? Around the Des Moines area, new homes are popping up all the time. Since most new neighborhoods are built in former corn fields, the houses look so lonely! This project used the landscaping to help this new build look like it’s been there forever. I’ll walk you […]