Professional hardscaping lends curb appeal to your home and creates a great first impression. Because of this and many other benefits of a beautifully-done hardscaping element to your back or front yard, many homeowners in North Carolina are hiring professional hardscapers this Spring. If you’ve got a project in mind this year, now’s the time to start making calls to find the right expert to help you make your plans become a reality. Here’s why you should hire a pro.

1. Plan the work. Work the plan.

The internet and sites like Pinterest are full of tons of amazing examples of what a well-done hardscaping project looks like. Patio designs, elaborate outdoor kitchens, cozy reading nooks built into outdoor stone seating with a pergola overhead, retaining walls that double as terraced gardens – the sky is the limit and people out there are incredibly creative.

But lots of homeowners have a hard time translating a wish list or an online story board into real plans that make sense for them. Every homeowner is unique, with a unique set of circumstances, which makes it hard to simply slap someone else’s idea onto your own back yard. A professional hardscaper will come to your home and make a custom plan for you, based on many different variables that make your project special.

2. Step back to view the whole picture.

A pro will know how to analyze the topography of your yard, allowing for environmental factors that could present themselves. Pros have a keen eye for predicting water drainage issues, for example. And many have enough experience to instantly gauge whether a slope is too steep for a particular hardscaping element and whether it needs remediation before the project can get underway.

3. Complete projects with more efficiency.

Nobody wants to waste the entire season staring out their window at a half-finished hardscaping project. There are lots of factors that go into finishing a project on time, including materials ordering and delivery, inspection and/or permitting milestones, and unforeseen events like running into a hidden spring or unearthing a tree root while working on putting in a new patio. These kinds of obstacles and the delays they cause are enough to derail any do-it-yourselfer.

A pro, on the other hand, is well schooled in arranging and managing a construction schedule and can arrange for materials ordering and delivery to occur within a predicable time frame according to a master plan for the project. They also know who to call if the project runs into those unforeseen problems mentioned above, so they don’t waste any time getting them fixed and getting back to the original plans.

4. Improved results

There are a lot of DIY projects out there that you as a homeowner can take on to improve the value of your home or to simply make it a nicer, more beautiful place to live. However, hardscaping is probably not one of them, unless you have a lot of experience working with stone or large wooden structures, a lot of time on your hands, and endless patience.

Hardscaping requires several advanced skills that aren’t used very often, unless you are a professional hardscaper: mixing mortar, lugging heavy stones, cutting stone, and working on your knees all day, in the case of a patio project. For more complex projects like building an outdoor oven, you can add excavating, pouring footings, working with mortar, and building a flue.

You’ll simply get much better results if you leave this kind of work to the pros.

Next steps? Give COVIS a call today.

Our Raleigh hardscaping contractors have training and lots of valuable experience in handling projects like the ones described above (and other hardscaping projects as well). You should expect nothing less than a professional job that meets all your requirements and more when you hire them. Finally, you’re guaranteed beautiful results, since they want you to be happy with the job and will work with you to make everything come out right.