Springtime Landscaping Tips

April 4, 2022 by gibson Leave a Comment

Springtime Landscaping Tips

The temperatures are climbing, trees and bushes are donning their new green spring coats, lawnmowers are firing up for the first time after a long winter. That can only mean one thing: Spring has sprung!

With the renewal that spring brings, following suit with your landscaping chores is, or at least should be, at the front of your mind. Here are a few landscaping tips to get the outside of your home ready to enjoy.

Start Springtime Landscaping by Inspecting Your Trees and Shrubs

Trees are very valuable assets to your landscape – not only because of the beauty they provide, but also because they act as wind breakers, provide shade, and help to hold soil in place. You will want to inspect both your trees and shrubs to make sure they are healthy. Remove dead or dying branches, broken branches, and crossing branches. You may want to trim them back some too, encouraging a solid structure, plus keeping them nice and tidy. It also helps to prevent rogue limbs from causing damage to other structures, fencing, power lines, etc.

Preparing Your Perennial Beds

The next stop should be your perennial beds – good examples of these are your ornamental grasses, butterfly bushes and spireas. Depending on the plant, a good rule of thumb is to cut these back to between 2” and 8” from the soil. Conversely, you’ll want to hold off pruning some of your flowering bushes like your lilacs, forsythia, magnolias, or azaleas. Plan to prune these in late spring or early in the summer instead.

Testing Your Soil

When working in your plant beds, take a few minutes to evaluate how your soil looks. Healthy soil has moisture and life – living roots and living organisms, such as insects or worms. Unhealthy soil typically appears to be dry, crumbling, cracked, and/or compacted.

If you have concerns about soil health, inexpensive soil testing kits can be bought online or at your local home improvement stores. There are also some do-it-yourself options online that use some standard pantry items. Testing your soil can help you to determine if and what nutrients may be missing from your soil. Fertilizer can be added to soil with insufficient nutrients, but before doing so, you should always check with state and local governments regarding usage rules and regulations for your area.

Moving onto Mulch

Be sure to thicken up the mulch in your beds and around your trees to at least 1” but no more than 3”. You’ll want to ensure your mulch is lying flat and isn’t pushing up against the tree trunks. Adding mulch helps to maintain moisture, control weeds, and prevent soil erosion. It also aids in insulating the roots, helping to keep them cool and protected from the hot Florida sun. And above all, mulch beautifies your landscape. Plus, the mulch rings around your trees and shrubs will prevent damage from your mower and weed eater.

Springtime Landscaping Services from Gibson Outdoors

If your springtime landscaping leaves more to be desired, Gibson Outdoors landscaping services can help you – by designing the perfect landscaping plan for your Florida property. Contact Gibson Outdoors via the website contact form to learn more.

Make Your Seawall a Selling Feature

July 31, 2017 by gibson Leave a Comment

Part II: More Tips to Make Your Seawall a Selling Feature of Your Florida Home

Now that you have tackled cleaning, decluttering, making repairs and upgrades, and staging the home, discussed in part one of this post, we will move on to more tips that you can apply to your Florida seawall to make it a valuable selling feature.

Working with Experienced Professionals

Working with experienced professionals can make a big difference in the home selling process. They can make recommendations, guide you when making important decisions, and help get it listed and sold quickly.

An Experienced, Licensed Real Estate Listing Agent

Hiring the right listing agent to help you sell your home is key. Listing agents have a lot of responsibilities related to the sale of your home. The number of offers you receive, the dollar amount of those offers, and the speed of the sale can all be affected by who you choose to represent you as your listing agent. Their experience and familiarity with the area can make a big difference and financial impact on the sale of your home.

Asking friends, neighbors, and family for recommendations, reviewing a listing agent’s resume, calling references and understanding the agent’s marketing plan for your home are all great ways to find an experienced professional you can feel comfortable working with.

Gibson Marine Construction: Your Seawall Inspection and Repair Experts

When it comes to your seawall, hiring the right vendor to produce quality work is also important. Just as it is key to work with an experienced listing agent, it is also key to work with an experienced marine construction company that specializes in seawall inspection and seawall repair services. Gibson Marine Construction has over 30 years of experience; They are the seawall experts you can trust. Their full-service marine contractors offer customized solutions, designed to get you the most bang for your buck, making your seawall into a valuable selling feature of your Florida waterfront home.

Pricing Your Property to Sell

Pricing can be a sensitive topic of discussion. Too often property owners want to equate the price they paid for their home plus any additional funds put towards the property with the price they want to list the property for. But that’s not how the real estate pricing system works. The list price should be based on what the market will bear, essentially what buyers are willing to pay for the property.

Buyers Will Pay More for a Well Maintained, Updated Property

It’s no secret that buyers will pay more for a well maintained and updated property. The less money a buyer has to set aside for making repairs and upgrades, elevating the property to their desired standards, the more money they can put toward their purchase offer.

Homeowners who tackle the repairs and upgrades before putting the house on the market usually see an exponential return on their investment. The same applies to a property’s seawall.

A Well Maintained Seawall Can Add Exponential Value to a Property

Not only does a well maintained seawall add ambiance to your property, it also adds significant value. The cost of adding a seawall to a property typically runs around $150 per linear foot, depending on the materials used.

Well constructed and well maintained seawalls can have an extremely long lifespan, again, depending on the materials used and other elemental variables. You can call on the experts at Gibson Marine Construction to inspect and make repairs to your Florida seawall. Some common seawall repairs include:

Adding, repairing or replacing a well point drainage system
Supplementing existing anchors that are failing or have already failed with secondary anchors
Install a replacement cap
Repair or replace a tie back rod(s)
Repair grouting joints or replace grouting joints with new ones

Being able to market your property, showcasing a well maintained and structurally sound seawall can add significant value to your Florida waterfront property. It can give potential buyers some additional peace of mind and can often help the property command a higher sale price.

What You Want to Know About Seawalls

March 10, 2016 by gibson Leave a Comment

With all the inclement weather our neighbors to the north and west have been enduring, here at Gibson Marine we have been happy to welcome many new residents to Florida’s sunny shores.

As a Florida marine construction company, we feel it is our obligation to educate relocated homeowners on the installation, care, and maintenance of everything from docks to decks to seawalls.

Of course it’s the “fun” part of living life at the water’s edge when a new client from Canada arrives with images of long lazy days on their deck and then slipping off in their vessel into the tranquil Gulf of Mexico from their extruded PVC dock. It’s an extraordinary way to live, but these are all structures in need of vigilance to keep them safe and looking great.

Seawalls on the other hand, don’t exactly have the same “flash” of the other structures. Still, there is more variety than you may expect from something that helps keep a waterfront property safe.

What is a Seawall?

It is an embankment that defends the shoreline from erosion and potential flooding. While there is typically a coastal defense solution in place for seaside towns, a private seawall will provide that extra layer between your land and the water.

You could say a seawall is simply delaying the inevitable, but when you live at the waterfront, these are steps essential to co-exist with nature; respecting boundaries as it were.

What Kinds of Seawalls Can Be Built?

To say seawalls have come a long way is testament to the types of materials from which they can be constructed and of course exceptional professionals like ourselves who manage their installations!

Vinyl Seawalls

Also known as bulkheads or retaining walls, the use of vinyl sheet piling offers an opportunity for a more aesthetically pleasing appearance, due in part to the flexibility of a vinyl seawall. This ability to smoothly contour to the property’s edge is a seawall installation advantage.

Each seawall project has its own set of unique requirements. The stability of any seawall is dependent upon variables such as wall height, sheet pile length and strength, backfill, foundation soil and tide. The combination of factors that provide an effective barrier system.

Vinyl is also exceptionally resistant to damage from UV rays, rot, corrosion, and intervention by destructive marine creatures. Contact us for more information about their warranties; they are by and large outstanding.

Rip Rap Seawalls

An eco-friendly solution, these are also known as essentially “stone walls”. This seawall configuration works because it acts to absorb and deflect wave energy before it even reaches the shore of the property’s perimeter. The gaps that exist between the assembled rocks serve to trap and essentially slow the flow of water. This helps to retard erosion. Rip rap can also be used as its own line of defense or to help protect an existing seawall.

Gibson Marine Construction specializes in superior seawall construction, using only the industry’s leading products. Construction of a seawall requires quality materials and advanced technology in order to prevent erosion and to withstand strong winds and high waves.