There is a phrase that suggests that a person’s home is their castle. This is not meant to be taken literally, but in a figurative sense, it holds a lot of value. Your castle is the foundation of your life. It is where you eat, and you sleep, and you carry on with the majority of your family’s business, and even potentially the place where you work.
Because of this, you want to make your home your ideal environment. And that takes work. And that takes money. For foundational reasons, you should always start by putting your time and money beginning at the bottom.
In other words, what is at the ground level of your home? First of all, you need to stabilize any structural elements underneath the framework of your house. Second, you should consider finishing your basement. Often there is a lot of room down there, and with a little bit of creativity, you can make the space enjoyable as well as livable.
Third, work with your landscaping that exists around your ground floor. The structure of your home also extends outward from the main entrances and exits.
Stabilize Your Structure
What does it mean to stabilize the structure of your home? The skeleton of your house is built on a solid foundation. That solid foundation is usually made out of a mixture of concrete or steel. Over time, that structure can destabilize because of changes in the environment.
To reassert its structural integrity, you can use foam jacking to fill in the gaps and cracks. This is a high-tech way to ensure that all of the load-bearing areas of your foundation are behaving correctly. Alternatively, if the problem is a little bigger, you may need the services of someone like this company offering foundation repair in Ofallon in order to get things fixed so that your home is structurally sound once again.
Finish Your Basement
Once you know your structure and foundation are as strong as they need to be, a next option for you is to finish your basement. It’s amazing how many houses have all of this available room downstairs from their main floor, but they don’t use it to their advantage. Yes, it can cost some money to finish this downstairs area, but the return on investment is enormous.
Lots of people make game rooms or finished laundry rooms in their basements so that it doesn’t feel like a creepy den of spiders or a humid and leaky jail cell.
Get Your Landscaping Level
The foundation of your home isn’t just the structural elements underneath the frame of your house either. It also extends outward. In other words, the shape of the landscaping around your ground floor makes a big difference in how you feel about the structure of your household.
To this end, invest in landscaping immediately surrounding your home. This can mean adding trees, flowerbeds, bushes, or even just pathways or perhaps a deck. You can be as creative as you want. Just make sure to understand that these structural elements are a key focus if you’re trying to improve from the ground floor up.