Handyman in Morningside, Port St. Lucie

Established planting that has outgrown the house

Plenty of the planting on these streets has been in the ground a long time, and you can read that straight off the yards. Shrubs that went in as three-gallon pots are now above the gutter line. Bed edges have crept out into the lawn a few inches at a time until nobody can remember where they started. Some of the hedges along the fence lines have gotten heavy enough that you cannot tell which is holding the other up.

Bringing that back isn't a matter of running a trimmer over the top of it. Take too much off a badly overgrown hedge in one go and you're left looking at bare wood that may never fill in properly. We stage the cut over more than one visit where that's what the plant needs, and we re-cut the bed lines while we are at it, because a tidy hedge above a vanished edge still reads as neglected.

Houses of that age come with the matching indoor list, and we do that too: ceilings that need patching and texture-matching, hairline cracks in the drywall, and paint that gave up on the south-facing wall years ago.