Everyone needs utilities to help provide electricity and keep their home cool when it’s hot out and warm in the winter months. But if you aren’t careful about it your utilities can crowd your backyard and ruin your beautiful landscaping. Luckily, there are things you can do to avoid this problem and make sure that your house and yard look beautiful while also keeping your house powered up like it needs to be.
Plan Carefully
The first step in making your utility equipment fade into the background is the planning stage. If you plan things effectively, you can effectively hide all utility equipment so that it doesn’t disturb your space at all. Sometimes you have to have your utilities in your yard, but that doesn’t mean they have to be the center of attention. Without planning, your utility equipment can be distracting and make your yard generally look less appealing than it would otherwise.
But with a good plan, you can place them carefully so that they are minimally visible. Your plan should include where in the yard to place the utility boxes, the kinds of landscaping you will use in your yard, and other elements. All of this will come together to help make the utility equipment better camouflaged and able to simply blend in so that your yard is more beautiful and easier to enjoy all year long.
Disguise Things
A big part of the plan will be figuring out how to disguise utility elements to make them a more attractive part of your yard. When you’re doing this, you want to make sure that the disguise you create doesn’t obviously point to you hiding something. In general, you want to landscape a larger area than your utility boxes take up so you can create a beautiful element to your yard that will help to disguise what is there behind the scenes.
Sometimes your utility equipment isn’t just large boxes, it can also be things like outlets or a spigot. Disguising these smaller things is usually easier, but since they are small there are sometimes more of them to hide. With small utility equipment, consider the kinds of covers you can use to add aesthetic appeal to the areas they are in while also completely obscuring the utility elements you are trying to deemphasize.
Consider Size
You may want to start the planning stage of your project early, but it is difficult to plan effectively if you don’t know what you are dealing with and how big each utility box is. Take care to figure out what utility equipment you need first and to choose the smallest options that you can to still make sure the job is done correctly. It is generally easier to plan around smaller utilities than huge things that take up your whole yard. For example, propane tanks come in different sizes, so you can choose one that fits your needs, but also doesn’t dominate your yard. Consider what you actually need and try to choose the smallest possible option to fit those needs.
Create Structures
Sometimes the easiest way to hide your utilities is to create a structure around them that will bring beauty and function to your yard while also obscuring the less visually appealing things behind them. Creating wooden boxes that surround your utilities can actually add to the style of your yard and help to create a more appealing look. If you really want your structures to add to your space, make it a point to match them with the furniture and style of your space generally. Using the same materials and style will make your yard cohesive and help your utility equipment to actually add to your outdoor space.
Use Plants
One of the most common ways to hide utility boxes is to use plants and foliage as a disguise. This kind of project takes serious planning so that your camouflaging plants look natural and beautiful rather than sticking out as an obvious disguise. The cool thing about plants is that they can serve many purposes at once. They can bring shade to your yard, disguise your utility boxes, add beauty to the space, and even grow food that you can enjoy. You just want to choose a nice variety of plants that work together to make your backyard a beautiful paradise.
When you are choosing plants for your yard, think about how you use the space and what kinds of plants could give you the most benefits. Some people like their plants big and bushy while others want more delicate plants or even a mixture. In the end, the choice is yours and you can use plants to hide utility fixtures and make your backyard more beautiful.
Make Color Choices
You can also use color to cleverly disguise utility equipment in a surprisingly simple way. The grey color of most utility boxes is intended to pass as neutral but, in most yards, it sticks out like a sore thumb. By simply painting your utility fixtures to better match your space you can make it disappear with very limited effort on your part. For example, a grey utility box on a green house is highly visible, but a green utility box on the same house surrounded by green plants is very difficult to see. Harnessing the power of color is a great way to get rid of the ugly elements of your home without actually having to remove them.
No one wants to have ugly utility boxes and other equipment in their yard, but it’s a reality that many people have to deal with on a regular basis. If you can find easy ways to disguise the ugly fixtures you hate, you can get back to enjoying your yard for the great things it does have to offer. And the sooner you take care of this problem, the sooner you can find joy in the outdoor spaces you already have at your home.
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