What It’s Like to Work with a Landscape Designer
You’ve seen our outdoor spaces, right? They are my absolute dream come true! But now, when I’m sitting outside and I look out to the yard, I feel a little underwhelmed. There’s nothing wrong with our landscaping, perse, but it doesn’t really coordinate with the scale of our outdoor living spaces. Aside from maintaining a few seasonal flower pots, I am not a landscaping expert by any stretch of the imagination. Kerry has a little more experience than I do in this arena, but when I start dreaming, I dream big, so I knew it was time to call in a professional.
Enter: Casey Pearcy, landscape designer, horticulturist, and owner of Ember Outdoors. We were introduced to Casey by some friends of ours who had just had a pool installed and worked with Ember Outdoors to do the gorgeous landscaping around it. During our first meeting, I told her that I was a big dreamer, and Kerry even had some big dreams of his own for what our yard could be. We shared our ideas with her for our absolute fantasy yard featuring a variety of colorful plants and flowers, a fire pit patio, and even a water feature.
A couple weeks later, Casey came by to share the plans she had come up with. You know the heart-eye emoji and the star-eye emoji? My face alternated back and forth between those two as I saw visualizations of everything we said we wanted.
As she talked us through everything, I started to realize what a huge scope of work we had asked for. I started to get a little nervous about the total cost for this project. Turns out my nerves were for good reason. With my limited experience, I did not have a good gauge for what to expect, so when the price tag came in at a little bit more than the purchase price of our first home, I was experiencing a little bit of sticker shock. Don’t get me wrong -- the cost is completely justified given the enormity of the project! I just wasn’t expecting it.
Casey was so understanding and explained that she put together our dream vision, but that we could choose components to start with and work through the whole plan in phases. She had the different components itemized in her proposal, so we knew how much each aspect would cost.
We are still working with Casey and figuring out what we want to do, and our first step was purchasing the detailed plans she put together. She so perfectly captured our vision that we wanted to honor her time spent on our project. Now we are going to go through the plans and see if there are any parts of it we can work through on our own and where we may need a little extra support from Casey.
We’ll be posting updates about this journey to the blog, so be sure to check back and see where we go next!