Handyman in Riverview, Port St. Lucie

Nautical street names, forty years of build dates

The street names around here run nautical, and the lots run to about a quarter of an acre. What they don't run to is a single decade. There are early-eighties originals a few streets from mid-2000s builds, so two neighbors can want genuinely different things from the same crew on the same afternoon.

The older places usually need their beds rescued: mulch layered up over the original bed line year after year, shrubs that have quietly become small trees, an edge that disappeared some time in the last decade. The newer ones need the opposite — planting with some substance to it instead of the three shrubs and a palm the builder signed off on.

Some of these streets have no association, which cuts both ways — check your own deed before you plan anything, because it varies block to block. Where there isn't one, nobody is going to send you a letter about your front yard, and nobody is going to make your neighbor deal with theirs either. If you want the yard to look like someone chose it, that's on you — and it is the cheapest fix on the list.