How To Make A Low-Maintenance Modern Garden | Great Home Ideas

If your lawn is becoming hard to manage, overgrown with weeds, or just not working for your space anymore, a low-maintenance, modern garden makeover might be the perfect solution.

Charlie visits a garden with a patchy, weed-infested lawn and transforms it into a functional, low-care entertaining area. Even if your garden looks different, he’s packed this project with clever design tips, plant screening ideas, and budget-friendly ways to create a space that’s beautiful and easy to maintain.

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Welcome to Great Home Ideas, your destination for DIY fixes, home makeovers and amazing ways to bring your garden to life. Each week, we’ll be sharing fascinating stories, fresh projects and expert advice to help you transform your space and make your dream home a reality. Whether you’re up for a full on reno or just like to watch other people bring their visions to life, subscribe for inspiration, tips, and easy-to-follow DIY projects.

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it goes without saying that the garden is my happy place it’s a spot to relax and entertain but over time as elements change it might need a bit of an update that way you can keep it good-looking and functional too and this is just one of those spots believe it or not this used to be a really nice lawn but as these plants have grown up it’s shaded half of it out and the weeds have come in so before you can put in any garden you got to be out with the old before we can get in with the new we high street hearts feeling like [Music] this all night feeling like with the grass all gone it’s time to start setting out our area now I want an area for seating which I’m going to be doing on this side and garden beds over here now for the seating area we’re going to have pebbles so the water can drain through so I’ve excavated to a depth of 50 mil and I’m just spraying in the line where the edging will go [Music] to separate our two areas I’m using a really simple aluminum edging and by giving it a really soft S shape it just breaks up the rectangle makes it feel much more inviting what do you reckon [Music] [Applause] this aluminium edging is a great product because it’s nice and flexible so you get a great curve but just as an insurance policy that it doesn’t move I’m just hunching up both sides we’re putting that about 20 mil beneath the top of the surface of the edge so we get a nice clean finish but it’ll be nice and strong too don’t rush a single thing just take your time to connect this garden with the lower garden and the stairs behind me i’m just installing a few stepping stones now I found these under the house and they match the existing tiles i’m just putting them on a mud base and I’ve set up a string line between our drain and our existing level there so I can use that string line to keep them all in line but I can also use it to make sure the levels are right as well i’m spacing these 280 mm apart now that is quite wide but they’re going to have a pebble infill so it’s really just a suggestion of where the path can [Music] [Applause] go to give this garden a bit of a destination and a feature I’m utilizing these Gabian baskets now I’m going to be turning these into bench seats and I’m going to position them so you can sit down and enjoy the view i’ve just got these baskets off the shelf and they couldn’t be easier to put together you just twist these little pigtails in the corners and it holds them in place and I put down a pa that’s just to bring us up to height now I’m filling these with some river pebbles and it does take a long time to do but it is well worth it because this is the artistic face you’re going to see you can fill in the middle with whatever you like [Music] for the top of our gabians I’m actually putting some hardwood sleepers to create a bench seat now I’m cutting these to 1,800 and then I’m just going to use a galvanized plate to join them together [Music] as well as our larger bench I’m going to be building a smaller one as well this one is only 900 long everything else is exactly the [Music] same because these hardwood sleepers are quite a rustic product they’ve got a few splinters on them so I’m going to hit them with a planer on all the edges to give them a nice shamfer and then when they’re put together we’ll hit them with a belt sander as well [Music] here with [Music] you so in a world [Music] To give us a privacy screen and a nice backdrop to our garden I’m just planting up some bamboo now this is slender weaver bamboo it’s a clumping bamboo but I’m still putting it into a pot it’s going to get to about 6 m tall and it’s nice and upright so it’s really good for screening it is a grass though so the more water you can give it the better it will grow [Music] [Music] because we’ve got such a lovely curve in this garden bed I wanted to recreate that with the planting and in the shady areas I’ve got near America or the walking iris in the sunny areas I’m using a combination of succulents the crashula and some natives and one of my favorite natives is this amazing winger called Smokeoky it’s got an incredibly dense habit and a lovely variegation to the leaf which just makes it pop with color for a bit of height I’m just using the Gaia lily so that’s going to get much larger as that huge tall spike of flowers [Music] [Music] [Music] some forest finds mulch and 10m pebble really complete the picture and they transform what was once a useless dying lawn into something that’s not only looking good but it’s functional too [Applause] [Music] [Music] stop right there now the word hero it gets thrown around a lot but not all heroes wear capes some use cordless drills now I’m far too modest and humble to ever apply the word hero to myself but if I can save someone from this situation well you can call me whatever you like place you’re welcome storage is definitely something we can’t get enough of and we love coming up with new ideas to help keep your place tidy now this one is super simple to put together and so flexible you can store just about anything in it and it all starts by cutting this MDF to size and that is everything cut so the way it works we’ve got our top and our bottom and these ones here are going to be our sides which is going to create a box and we’ll have two open ends each side which will have two drawers in it and to stiffen the whole thing up I’ll be using this across the center as a divider which would just create that rigidity [Music] [Music] for the drawers it’s exactly the same process cut everything to size and glue and screw it together with the drawers and the storage box together now I’m going over the whole lot with a clear polyurethane now this is important to do because it protects the MDF and it will prevent it from swelling to make it easy to move our storage box around and move it out the way I’m just adding on these casters and these clear wheels are perfect for hardwood floors now we’re ready to add our drawers to our storage box to do this we’re using some soft closing runners now most runners of this style are going to be 13 mil thick and we’ve got one on each side that means I’ve made these drawers 26 m smaller than our opening and that’s very important that you get that accurate now to install them you simply separate these two parts the smaller one goes on the drawer and this thicker piece that will go inside our box with everything together you could simply choose just to paint this storage unit but instead we want to take it up a notch so we’ve decided to cut it with these hardwood panels and I’ve just made the sides a little bit bigger that way once this box all finished you won’t even see the [Music] casters now we could use another piece of hardwood panel on top but we want to make this more child- friendly so instead I’ve got this colorful acoustic panel which will be a perfect base for the kids to work [Music] on base the dimensions of these drawers around the size of these containers so you can fit seven in each drawer giving you ample storage options i think this could be the building block to a tidier home [Applause] it’s all right