5 Landscaping Design Ideas If The Grass Refuses To Grow In Your Garden

September 23, 2021March 23, 2022 Healthy HomesGardens

One issue that many landscape architects have to overcome when designing for clients is when the grass in that client’s garden does not grow properly, or not at all. As many landscape architects or garden experts such as www.gardenspec.com.au, use grass lawns and areas as one of the primary features within their designs, it means they need to think of alternatives.

If you are considering employing a landscape designer, but your grass does not grow, this problem could be down to one of three issues. The first is that the grass is not getting enough sunshine. This would not normally be a problem in most areas of Australia, but if there is an adjacent large tree or building keeping the grass constantly in the shade, this could be the cause.

The second reason is simply that you are not watering your grass enough or that there is not a proper means of irrigating them. The third problem might be that you are too enthusiastic when mowing your grass, especially if you have the mower set to cut the grass very short. Finally, the soil in your garden might not have sufficient or the right nutrients that promote grass growth. So, we have two problems you can likely fix and two you probably can’t.

We say “can’t”, assuming that you cannot move large buildings or trees, nor can you change the makeup of the soil in your garden. However, if this applies to you, all is not lost, because here are 5 ideas that your landscape architect will be able to implement to ensure that your garden’s landscaping design is still something you will love and be proud of.

Install Decking

An option that your landscape architect might suggest to you as an alternative to grass or a concrete patio is decking. Installing decking would almost certainly require less upheaval than a patio, and would be a cheaper option too. However, it could still be used for most of the same activities that you would partake in on a patio. You also would have a choice of materials and colours too. Your new decking should last a while if it’s built correctly with good quality materials, however it can also easily be maintained through deck sanding.

Build A Concrete/Paved Patio

If the grass is simply not going to grow in your garden then instead of having a lawn within your landscaping design, you could ask your landscape designer to include a concrete or paved patio instead. This would certainly be a low-maintenance option and provide you with an ideal area where you, your family, or guests can sit and enjoy your surroundings. It can also be used for outdoor parties and barbecues.

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Why Using Cheap SEO Services Can Destroy Your Construction Company’s Google Rankings

August 31, 2021May 17, 2023 Healthy HomesMarketing Advice

For any SEO which you may be considering for your construction company’s website, you can consider two distinct periods. There is the period where the SEO’s goal is to improve the website’s rankings, and once it ranks, there is the period where SEO is designed to maintain those rankings. A digital agency such as tribecamedia.com.au will confirm, there is little point in achieving high Google rankings if you lose them soon after.

Whether your construction company’s website has not achieved high Google rankings, but you want it to, or it already has decent rankings, and you want to ensure sure that you retain them at the expense of your local competition, you need an SEO campaign to be implemented. Who you choose to achieve that for you is critical to its success and making the wrong choice could be disastrous on many levels.

Listening to feedback and doing some research into the experiences of business owners whose SEO has gone catastrophically awry, a common theme that appears a lot is that they chose the cheapest option that was available to them.

Why Who Keeps The Family Pets Can Be As Contentious A Divorce Issue As Arrangements For The Children

August 23, 2021May 3, 2023 Healthy HomesLegal Advice

When any couple is going through divorce proceedings the work their family lawyer has to do will very much depend on whether the couple in question are able to agree on the terms of their divorce, or whether they cannot agree, and then the family court has to make the decisions for them. If it is the former scenario then a family lawyer will merely need to draw up the divorce agreement and send it for approval by the family court.

If agreement cannot be reached, then there are several areas of dispute which might exist. The most common are arrangements for any children of the two parents who are divorcing, and the property settlement where the assets and liabilities are divided. There is another area of dispute that is one which does not normally hit the headlines but when it occurs can cause more friction between a divorcing couple than any other, and that is who gets to keep the family pet or pets.

For anyone who has never owned a pet having just read that last sentence, your eyebrows might be raised in astonishment that a pet could cause such problems during a divorce process, however, as any pet owner will tell you, emotional attachments to pets can be very strong. The mere thought that an ex-spouse or partner will take that pet away from them, can induce a person to fight as hard as possible to prevent that from happening.

Who Needs a Home Lift?

July 30, 2021September 23, 2021 Healthy HomesRenovating

Most people who think of lifts, envisage them being in high-rise apartments or places like hospitals. However, these days it is becoming more usual to see home lifts in private homes. You may think that is only the frail elderly that would need to have a lift in their home, but in fact this is not so. When you think of the energy expended going up stairs and the difficulty of taking goods up and down you will soon realise that having a lift in the home is a necessity rather than a luxury.

Middle Aged

Very often, the ground floor of the home is used for the garage and outdoor living accessories. That means you need to carry all your groceries and every single thing you need in the home up the stairs. Hauling all your groceries out of the boot of your car is bad enough; carting them up steps and stairs is worse still, especially when you are already tired from a day at work. So you don’t have to be elderly to make good use of home lifts.

The Elderly

Of course, the elderly will certainly benefit from a lift in their home. They are the ones who are most likely to stumble and fall on stairs. Such a fall could easily break multiple bones and they may never recover. It is a shame to see their life ended prematurely all for want of a simple lift to help them up and down the stairs. Older people will be able to stay independently in their homes for much longer when they have the aids they need to make life easier for them. And if they need to use a walker, it is much easier and safer for them to use a lift than to try and get that walker up the stairs or down.

5 Reasons Why Relocating Your Wills Lawyer Offices Can Boost Its Revenue

July 11, 2021September 21, 2021 Healthy HomesMarketing Advice, Relocating

If you own or manage a wills lawyer business, such as www.perthwillslawyer.com.au, the premises you operate from can play a huge role in the success of that business. Whether it provides an excellent working environment for your staff or gives prospective clients who visit a positive impression, your business premises can be more influential than many give them credit for.

It could be that you have never really given your premises much thought previously, but we encourage you to do so. More than that you should actively reflect upon whether or not your current business premises have a positive impact on your business, or a negative one. Even if you consider your current premises to be ‘ok’, it may be time to ask yourself whether relocating your wills lawyer business to new premises could give it an advantage.

Many business owners, in a vast array of sectors, have found that relocating their business has transformed its performance dramatically. The question is, why that might be the case, and so we are going to answer that question by exploring some of the reasons why relocating a business can bring rewards.

Your Business Is Closer To Its Client Base

Assuming your wills lawyer business is one that works on behalf of local clients, it must surely make sense that the closer you are in relation to where those clients might live, the better. Often, the reason that a business is not performing as well as it might, is that its location means it is further away from its client base than most of its competitors. Relocating to an office closer to your clients and where it is easy for them to travel to has to be a means of securing more of those clients.

3 Tips To Strategically Get Rid Of The Bugs That Attack Your Landscape Garden

June 11, 2021April 5, 2023 Healthy HomesGardens, Property Maintenance

No matter whether you work on a large landscaping project, or simply have a garden at home which you love tending, there is one thing that will you unite you, and that is your hatred of bugs, especially those which attack your plants and flowers.

For many home owners, property maintenance professionals and gardeners, dealing with a bug problem is something which is not especially enjoyable, but should they ever get fed up with it and leave the bugs to do their worst, all their hard work will have been for nothing. Pretty soon, plants and flowers will be attacked, devoured, and ultimately killed by those tiny pests.

However, it need not be that way, as there are several ways in which you can deal with, and in many cases, eradicate bugs from your garden. Doing so requires you to take several actions, and this does not involve simply spraying everything in sight randomly.

You need to approach the problem of bugs strategically, in much the same way an army general would if they were planning an attack on an enemy. So, if you see bugs as the enemy of you, your landscape garden, and all the plants and flowers in there, then here is an approach you should take.

Know Your Enemy

As with any scenario where you have an opponent, the more you know about them, the better your chances are of defeating them. This applies to military conflict, sporting competitions, political contests, and in trying to rid your garden of bugs.

For this, you need to have a full and clear understanding of the bugs you are up against, as this will differ depending on where you are located, the sorts of plants you have in your garden, and even the time of year.

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How Sustainability Can Increase the Efficiency of Your Business

May 8, 2021June 30, 2021 Healthy HomesSustainability

Many city based businesses such as a web design company are using the fact that they follow sustainability guidelines in their offices as a marketing angle in the hope of attracting like minded clients. In fact, they are successful at this in most cases, since people now realise the importance of doing their small bit to help save the earth’s resources by reducing their carbon footprint.

Such practices don’t even take much effort and many actually save you money, so it’s worthwhile to find out what you can do and implementing some, if not all the strategies. For instance, if your small office needs a new printer, you might consider getting one that will do more than one job. Or you might want to look at the specifications to see whether there is a toner or ink saver mode.

If all offices were to do this, the whole mounts up and saves in several ways –

The business saves on the cost of ink or toner
Using a multifunction printer can save on space in the office
There is less rubbish going into landfill
There are fewer resources being used to replace products and accessories.

Another way to save is simply to make sure you choose a printer – or other product – that is suitable for your output. If you choose a cheap printer that is slow to print one page, the power used in printing is excessive when you need to have at least 20 pages printed in a day. But if your printer’s output is 20 pages per minute, the device is only working for one minute – unless you want more pages than that.

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6 Ways to Reduce Your Environmental Footprint

April 17, 2021June 30, 2021 Healthy HomesSustainability

People in the modern world are becoming increasingly aware of their environmental impact and the way their actions affect parts of the planet thousands of kilometres away. Small business owners across the country – from digital marketing agencies to family-owned grocery stores – are modifying their workplace practices to minimize their environmental footprint, and you should be doing the same.

I’ve spent some time researching the topic to bring you the following six ways to reduce your office’s environmental footprint. Remember, every business is different, so you won’t necessarily have to focus on every one of these. Nevertheless, they are still very useful.

Recycle as Much as Possible

Recycling is one of the best ways to reduce your office’s carbon footprint. One thing a lot of people don’t realise is that pretty much everything can be recycled if you look hard enough. Old electronics can be taken to specified disposal points, furniture can be donated to op shops or repurposed, and even single-use plastics can be recycled if you try hard enough.

Reduce Paper Usage

A major issue in many offices is excessive paper usage. You can make your business more environmentally friendly by spending some time analyzing your paper use and reducing where possible. For example, only print where necessary, reuse old printing as scrap paper for note taking, and reduce paper communication.

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Concrete Pool Remodelling Versus Replacement

January 19, 2021January 25, 2023 Healthy HomesRenovating

If you have a concrete pool within your property, and it is looking less than 100%, with possibly even some damage, or if you are unhappy with the design, then the decision has to be made as to whether you are going to remodel the pool, or completely replace it with a new one.

This throws up a number of questions in addition to the primary one of whether to remodel or renew. There is the question of what size of budget you are to need for either option, what design ideas are going to work in either case, and whether you and your family are prepared for the upheaval that the likes of the pool being removed and replaced are going to create.

Often the first option that most people consider is the remodelling one for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is related to budget with the fact that having a concrete swimming pool remodelled is going to cost a whole lot less than having one removed, and a completely new one installed by an expert.

That is not to say that remodelling a concrete pool is a cheap exercise, as it will still require a five-figure dollar amount, but it can often work out to be around 50% of the cost of the removal and replacement of a concrete pool.

Advantages Of Commercial Concrete Floor Coatings For Offices

October 5, 2020October 7, 2021 Healthy HomesFlooring

It is true that many offices have plush carpets but what about those offices that have a concrete floor, and where using a carpet would not be suitable or appropriate? The answer is to either use concrete floor coatings or concrete paint which can provide a superb finish when done by concrete floor coatings professionals, which in most cases is even safer than the use of carpet.

In fact, using concrete floor coatings to refinish a concrete floor in an office setting has many advantages for the business that does so, and for those who work in that office.

Durability

One of the top reasons that a business will choose to have its concrete office floors refinished using special concrete floor coating is that it will greatly prolong the life of that floor. Obviously concrete is a relatively robust material, however, it can deteriorate, and get damaged.

Rather than having the upheaval of closing the office every time when repairs are needed due to a problem with, or damage to, the concrete floor, with a coating protecting it there is little chance of any remedial work ever being needed.

Safer And Healthier Working Environment

Offices are not the first workplace that would normally come to mind when thinking about accidents at work, however, they can, and most certainly, do, happen there. Concrete floor coatings are non-slip so even if someone is rushing to the photo copier, they should have a secure grip underfoot.

Concrete floor coatings are also healthier in the sense that unlike carpets and other soft floor coverings, they do not attract and retain bacteria and other undesirables, such as allergens.

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How to Get Rid of Bad Smells Lingering in Your Home

February 10, 2020February 20, 2020 Healthy HomesA Healthy Home Environment, Property Maintenance

There’s nothing quite like coming home to the beautiful smell of dinner wafting out from the kitchen, or bread baking in the bread maker. But what about those smells you don’t want? There’s nothing quite like them either, but for an altogether different reason. When it comes to bad smells lingering in your home, getting to the source, and cleaning them is of the utmost importance. Read on to learn what it takes to say goodbye to them for good.

Identify What the Smell Is

There’s no point rushing to the supermarket to pick up deodorisers, sprays, and candles if you don’t know what is causing the bad smell. By doing so, you’re masking it, rather than removing the source. Even though it’s not going to be pleasing to your senses to sniff around for the odour, it’s the only option you have to find it.

What does it smell like? Could it be dangerous? Is it stronger when you’re in a particular area of your home? Has it come on suddenly, or has it been getting worse? Identification is key to then moving on to getting rid of it.

Mould

If your home has a unique, musty odour, then there’s every reason to believe that mould could be to blame. Mold and mildew can smell like old mothballs or even wet cardboard and is quite distinctive.

It’s also more common around parts of your home prone to moisture, such as bathrooms. The first step to removing mould in your home is correcting the problem. If it’s caused by a leak in your bathroom, for example, then fixing that leak can stop the production of mould in its tracks.

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The Benefits of Good Landscaping

October 14, 2019August 23, 2020 Healthy HomesRenovating

Many people are purchasing fix-me-up properties to not only make their mark but make a profit. They will take a home that no one put a lot of time into, add their stamp, improve it, then sell it off to someone who wants a home already finished. Others will buy a standard property then enhance its overall look and landscaping so that they can live in it comfortably.

In many cases, people who buy property don’t put as much passion or love into the landscaping as they do the interior of the house. If you ask Intreeg Landscapes, they say the landscape is more valuable than you think, and here’s why.

It Adds Value
If you spend time and money on good landscape design, you are more than likely going to see it back in your hand when the time comes to sell. The average percentage increase of value that landscaping brings can be between 5-12 percent and depends on whether you’ve had an expert’s touch – which is recommended – and the overall value of the property as well.

If you are looking for a quick flick on a property, then dedicate a few extra days to your yard. You’d be surprised at the difference a little bit of weeding, gardening, and landscaping can make.

How to Landscape with Pets in Mind

June 3, 2019January 23, 2020 Healthy HomesGardens

Did you know there are 20 dogs for every 100 people in Australia? That’s nearly five million dogs in a country of dog lovers. Divine Landscapes advise that if you have one or more, then you’ll likely want to think of ways to make your yard not only beautiful but more appealing to your furry friend as well. Landscape design can be more than merely appealing to adults, so here’s how to achieve the best of both worlds.

Add a Pond
Water features such as ponds and waterfalls can be beneficial for your mental health. However, they can also be a reason for wagging tails. Dogs love to drink fresh water, so why not create a safe and flowing pond or waterfall that’s welcoming for your dog? For safety reasons, ensure there is a safe area for them to access the water, such as a gentle slope. If you’re not sure how to pull it off, consult a landscape design expert.

Full Fencing

Around nine dogs from every 1,000 resi dents are picked up by dog control in Australia every year. While many of those dogs are strays and require rehoming, many escape their owners’ poorly fenced properties. If you are going to incorporate your dog’s needs into your landscape design, then fencing should be your first priority.

Choose the appropriate fence sizing based on how much of an escape artist your dog is. As a rule of thumb, the bigger your dog, the taller the fence you need. If you’re not sure how to achieve function and beauty with your landscape design, a landscaping expert in your area can help.

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Top Tips For Maintaining Your Glass Pool Fence

April 5, 2019April 24, 2020 Healthy HomesGardens

With the rise in popularity of glass pool fencing, it’s important to make sure that people know how to look after and maintain their glass fences. Other forms of pool fencing – such as the metal tubular style – have traditionally been designed to hide dirt and to require little maintenance.

Unfortunately, according to property maintenance experts Complete Projects, this isn’t the case with glass fencing. Glass shows even the smallest specks of dirt, and will even appear ‘dirty’ if it’s not dried after being wet. It can therefore appear hard to maintain glass fences, but it’s really not if you know what you’re doing.

Below you will find a list of our top tips from Glass Pool Fencing Perth to keep your glass pool fence looking as good as new for years to come:

Make Sure You Clean Regularly

Regular cleaning is one of the most important things when it comes to keeping your glass pool fence in good condition. However, it’s very important to make sure that you clean your fence properly. Avoid harsh abrasives and chemicals, and try not to scratch or otherwise damage your glass while you’re cleaning.

Exactly how often you clean your fence will depend on you and how motivated you are, but you should try and clean it at least every 2-4 weeks if you live in a harsh environment. Examples of harsh environments include near the ocean or in areas where mineral rich bore water is used.

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Prevent Flooding with These Landscaping Ideas

February 17, 2019September 3, 2021 Healthy HomesGardens

Depending on where you live in Australia, flooding may or may not be a problem for you. However, if it tends to rain more often than not, you might find you need to get creative with your landscaping options. Failure to take care of flooding and water flow can result in a soggy yard that you use less than you would like.

Check out this helpful advice, we put together with Wild Realtor, below

Locate the Problem

Before you go and buy everything you need for your landscaping task, find out why and how you have a problem with flooding in the first place. Typically, flooding occurs when the earth can’t absorb any more water, with nowhere to drain. It then moves to the lowest point in your property – the place where you need to install drainage. Sometimes, flooding can occur with heavy rain in a short space of time. It falls quicker than your soil can absorb it.

Find Out if Your Property is Prone

Flooding can be a once-off occurrence, or your property could be prone to it. Common signs your property is likely to flood are include a sloping lawn, stains around your home’s cladding, a missing top gutter system, and water pooling on your driveway.

Divert Water

When you begin to alter your landscaping, think about where water typically floods and take action. The last thing you want is for it to end up right in the area you’ve just turned into a barbecue nook! Install a spouting system that helps to divert the water away from your house. You may also like to include downspout extenders to draw it away.

Use It To Your Advantage

Does your property flood in the same place all the time? If you can’t fix it, work with it. Create a rain garden in this area. Add flood-proof plants, dig out the turf, install an overflow and berm, and add mulch with native grasses. Before you know it, your previously-flooded lawn is a beautiful rain garden that looks the part.