Backyard landscaping

We recently had some landscaping work done in our backyard. It’s a project that we wanted to kick off shortly after moving in (THREE YEARS AGO) but were bogged down by decision paralysis and a general lack of vision.

The vision problem plagues us both inside and outside the house. People who have visited can attest to how generally undecorated our house is. We haven’t painted any of the walls, and we have maybe like 7 or 8 things hanging on the walls. For outside, if we were going to spend a decent amount of money to put things in the ground, things that can die, I wanted to have a solid plan and some way to visualize how it would look.

Now, there’s probably 50+ programs I could’ve used to create these top-down diagrams:

That doesn’t get me the 3D visualization my brain needs, though, so I bought and learned Realtime Landscaping Pro. It took about 20 hours of self-learning, some cursing, and a lot of throw-away designs (the final version was called try5). Eventually I got the hang of the program and my final attempt came together pretty quickly. I took a photo from our back deck and was able to bring that in to the program for added realism, plus an avatar for scale.

This got me like 80% of what I wanted. The power of this particular application, though, is its ability to grow the plants. This is its approximation of year 3.

You can even walk around it video game style! Overall I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out. There’s still a lot of fine-tuning jobs to do, such as relocating the irrigation, placing borders, extending some gutters, and possibly putting some lighting in place, but we were able to accomplish our primary goal of getting trees in the ground so they can start growing.