We bought our town home almost a year ago. I love that we have a corner lot since we have more room to do landscaping. When we bought the house the builder just put in minimal landscaping. We also had tons of grass on the side yard which without a sprinkler system (in Virginia it's rare to have a sprinkler systems) it would be hard to water all the grass and mow all the time. Last August my husband and I decided to rip out a lot of the grass and build a flower bed to cut down on the watering and mowing.
We were only able to afford a few hydrangeas, a few green shrubs and 2 crepe myrtle bushes. We installed everything in one weekend. I never really liked how we finished it but shortly after we installed everything I found out I was pregnant and life just took over. I knew that we would revisit the yard this summer and add more plants.
Finally after having baby Madison I was ready to get out there and finish the yard. Our neighbor works for another home builder and is always getting free landscaping from the model homes that they are closing out. Knowing this I have been waiting for our builder to sell the last town home and single family home so I could ask for some of the landscaping. Typically a builder will rip out all of the landscaping near parking lots and their models and throw it in the dumpster. Crazy!! I know. It is such a waste.
The day finally arrived and I saw the foreman out there with the workers I asked if I could have some of the plants and they said whatever we could dig out I could have. I could see in my husband's face that he was not looking forward to digging everything up and transplanting but when I told him how much money we were going to save his face changed.
My husband, father in law and I dug up 6 rose bushes, 3 green shrubs, and about 15 little green bushes to add to our landscaping. It only took us about 3 hours to do everything and boy did it make a huge difference in our side yard. We had a few things left over so I added a few of the items to our new planter boxes in the back yard. (stay tuned for another post on our flower beds)
Not bad for free. All the plants would be around $400 if we had bought it at a Lowes or Home Depot. All we had to do was ask, dig everything up and transplant everything. The one lesson I learned was when I asked I specifically said the rose bushes, I should have said everything. There was this great crepe myrtle tree that I would have loved but another neighbor had asked about it and the builder gave it to her. Please learn from my mistake and asked for everything that you want. So next time you see a builder closing out a neighborhood go ahead and ask about the landscaping, you never know they may let you take everything.
