Your plans for home modernizing therefore, should not be confined within the walls of your home, but should extend to include lawns, gardens and outdoor living areas.

Landscaping, if properly planned, properly executed and properly financed will add to the comfort, improve the appearance and increase the value of your home.

For the most attractive and beneficial use of your grounds, you will want to include in your plans a number of features. Such essentials as a good lawn, thriving shade trees and paths and walks are usually taken for granted, yet often they are the most difficult to acquire, and may absorb a major part of your initial effort and budget.

On the other hand, such a project as an outdoor living room, with its cooking and entertaining facilities, or a children's play area may have been overlooked in the past because it sounded too difficult to achieve.

And yet such seemingly difficult features can add tremendously to your enjoyment and may, depending on what type you choose, be obtained with relatively little effort and cost!

Ensure You Have a Good Lawn

A good lawn is a basic requirement for attractive and enjoyable grounds. When you plant a tree you do so realizing that you are planting for years to come, even for generations. Few realize, however, that lawns must be planted in the same spirit.

The lawns of many famous estates were planted over a hundred years ago, and this type of turf, luxuriously verdant, is always an inspiration. Today's lawn builder is fortunate.

The battle against weeds and poor soils can be won, thanks to the introduction of new chemicals. And modern spreaders, mowers and other tools can help you develop a park like lawn.

But obtaining a fine lawn is sometimes a much more complicated matter than scattering seed or plucking weeds. You will want to have your soil analysed, and then, perhaps, change its make-up. Perhaps you will need to drain or grade. Before you select your seed formula, take into account the use to which your lawn will be put.

Will it be a general-purpose area or will it be a showplace in your garden where you will strive for a putting-green lawn? Except for problem lots in suburban areas, where the living space outside is small and may have to be paved, the lawn will be the broad canvas on which you paint your picture with flowers, shrubs, trees and walks.

Keep it larger than any other area, certainly two or three times the width of your borders and beds.

Do You Need a Play Area?

A play area that will keep your young children in their own back yard, where you can keep an occasional eye on them, need not be an unattractive one. Include a paved area, if possible, for bicycle riding, skating, hopscotch, etc.

The sandbox might be a sunken one, flush with the lawn, or it might be a raised box, an extension of a wall or fence that can be planted later.

Such imaginative ideas as hollowing out and painting an old stump to be used for a puppet theatre; getting hold of an un-seaworthy row-boat which can be gaily decorated for playing Robinson Crusoe; or putting up a ladder for climbing the side of the tool shed or a garden wall, so that climbing in other areas may be out-of-bounds, are ideas that will keep the "gang" at your house.