Home landscaping

A good home landscape brings a lot of great advantage to the owner both value and comfort. But to those with smaller lot area and low budget the major reason for doing a home landscaping is for pleasure and health reasons

Although landscaping is a luxury to the family whose meager income is just enough for food expenses, the need for a sound environment cannot be underemphasized too. By sound environment I mean a well organized surrounding landscaped with the least expenditures. There are several necessary components in a home landcape the serves the purpose. Among which are plants.

Plants are essential in a home garden. Having beautification around your home does not necessarily require high cost if you are resourceful. In the rural place like ours, a small cutting of your favorite plants can be sourced out for free from friends and neighbors. You can recycle cans and plastic containers as plant vases. The ultimate goal here is to have plants around you that gives off oxygen that you need and consume the carbon dioxide that you emit.

For those having high budget, good looking plants are available in many local suppliers. But remember to consider your priorities and design in selecting the type of plants. In the end it is not the value of the landscape that matters but the functionality and improvement in the life of the dwellers.

Termite control

As I was cleaning the backyard and trying to get rid of small wood cuts, waste from house construction, I noticed a huge colony of white insects feasting around. Termites! I was horrified.

One of common problems in houses build with wooden materials is termite attack. And this simple problem should not be taken for granted since it could lead to greater problems in the future. Reports even show that termites cause billions of dollars of damages to properties every year.

Termites are small insects that belongs to the family of the ants, bees, wasps, and the likes. They usually eat dead plant materials like woods, leaves, twigs, and other forms. Their colonies usually reach to thousand individuals the reason why they are so destructive and even considered as pests.

Control of these insects however have been studied and there are available remedies to counter the threats they pose on homeowners. A lot of sites discussed comprehensively about termites and I found one in killthetermites.com. I would not discuss the details here. You may refer to these sites for more information.

Going back to my predicament, I started to gather the rotten woods and dump them about 20 meters from the building line to prevent the colonies from moving into our walls. Although the lower part of the house are all concrete, there are wooden parts in the upper portion like the ceiling and trusses.

For now, the termite colonies maybe happy with their food in the dump site. But soon they will move to find new source of food and I guess by that time I should have employed termite control measures around the house.

Our home

A home, a shelter, or a house of physical structure, is a necessity and a basic need for every individual. But not everybody owns one. Report even showed that homelessness affects about 100 million people around the world in 2005 (Capdevilla, 2005). For me, although the real home is the spiritual place prepared by God, a physical place to dwell is also a gift that God gives to those who asked.

Our family, my own family, is classified under the average income bracket having a size of six and a meager income just above the $1 a day line set by the UN. Living within this condition may not be easy as you think of how to budget every penny that comes into your "Treasury Department." With the rising cost of education, medicine, and everything you think of, budgeting becomes even worse. At the end of the day your funds are not even enough to supply the basic needs food and clothing, and rent for shelter. For those who have no access to housing loan facilities forget about having to own a house.

But despite the challenges, with God's grace, we were able to put up a small house with nature surrounding us, minus the housing loan. Our home is unfinished yet but I felt God will help us complete it in his time just as he facilitated every ways that lead us to having it.

Photo above shows the unfinished house I personally designed. I know there's a lot of things to be done yet but funds are still out for further construction. Yes, I know money will just come in through God's grace.

Capdevila, Gustavo, 2005, "HUMAN RIGHTS: More Than 100 Million Homeless Worldwide", IPS, Geneva.