I Made My Yard Feel Really Expensive — with just Plants and Lights

My full backyard transformation starts here – landscaping, planting, and installing 12V lighting, all in one weekend! Sign up to Milanote for free with no time-limit: https://milanote.com/mateostabio

In this video, I’m tackling the first phase of my backyard makeover by transforming the space with new landscaping, plants, and 12V low-voltage landscape lighting. I’ll walk you through my process for planning out plants based on Montreal’s zone 5 climate, including sun/shade considerations, plant hardiness, and where I sourced everything (some of it creatively).

Then I get technical – showing exactly how I planned out my outdoor lighting, calculated wattage loads, chose wire gauge using a voltage drop chart, and installed everything step-by-step. If you’re thinking of upgrading your backyard with better lighting or landscaping, this video covers both the creative and practical sides of doing it yourself DIY.

This is Part 1 of my Backyard Makeover Series – in the next episode, we’ll build the wood fence around the pool equipment, an outdoor shower, and more.
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🛠️ Topics Covered:
• Backyard landscaping tips
• Choosing the right plants for sun, shade & part sun
• DIY low-voltage landscape lighting layout & installation
• Transformer sizing, wire gauge & voltage drop math

Watch Part 2: [coming soon]

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*My Gazebo Design Plans*
https://mateostabio.etsy.com/ca/listing/1601356443/13×16-gazebo-timber-frame-plan-pdf-plan

*Products used:*
Well Lights: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/wellLightsOsp9f
Path Lights: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/S3QzPathLights
Deck Lights: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/Ajh3tDeckLights
300W Transformer: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/DRljs
12 AWG Cable: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/iD5pF
Better Wire connector: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/QGAbn
Dielectric Grease: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/B6FCDDielectricGrease

*My Gear:*
My watch: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/HVilFcasioWatch
My Computer: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/bfRZumac
My Video Camera: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/ubqLJlumix
Lens I use: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/S8VMAsigmalens
Wireless Mic: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/IqJ7fWirlssMics
My drone: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/G9Vvbdjidrone
Tripod I use: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/B3_uOmfrtotripd
My Keyboard: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/4FVwMKeyKBd
Music/Audio I Use: https://urlgeni.us/epidEmiCSou

*Timestamps*
00:00 Intro
02:19 “Shopping” for Plants
03:08 Sun, Shade & Plant Hardiness Zones Explained
04:44 Chapter 1: Landscaping & Plants
08:45 Chapter 2: 12V Landscape Lighting
11:46 Technical: Let’s Talk Lighting Math
13:45 Installing the Transformer & Running Cable
14:15 Light Position & Connection
16:18 Landscape Lighting Install
18:05 Sponsor
20:07 Cleaning up the light install with dirt and mulch
23:05 Final Reveal

#backyard #transformation #makeover #landscape #lighting #diy #cinematic

I Turned My Backyard into a Private Resort in ONE Weekend
I Transformed My Backyard into a Luxury Resort in only 2 Days
I Built My DREAM Backyard Oasis in Just ONE Weekend! (ep.1)
Backyard Makeover – How to landscape & install outdoor lighting
How to Landscape (Plants & Lighting)
Turning a Basic Backyard Into a $1M Resort — with just Plants and Lights
I Made My Yard Feel Really Expensive — with just Plants and Lights

This is my backyard. I completely transformed it over the past 2 years with the fence, the gazebo, and the massive paper patio, but there’s still a few little things that aren’t completed. Our yard isn’t that big, so I really wanted to squeeze out every bit of potential it had. This whole space used to be abandoned. Kind of. Actually, it really was abandoned. It looks a thousand times better already. But this weekend, we’re gonna complete all the little tasks that I left half done. Not just to finish it, but to make it feel finished. Maybe make it look like a million bucks. Right here, we’re building a shower because every time the kids go out for a swim, Fiona asked them to go inside and shower. It’s also not a bad idea because when we have guests over, maybe they don’t want to go for a swim, but they still want to cool off. We’re landscaping all around the pool and all along the fence. I found some inspiration on Pinterest, so we’ll see what we find at the nursery. We’re also adding landscape lighting to completely change the environment in the evening after sunset. Create like a create a vibe. The next thing we’ll be looking at is the pool pump equipment area. It’s loud, it’s noisy, and it’s just not helping with the vibe I’m trying to go for. We’ll make a fence around all this to reduce the amount of noise coming from the pool pump. It’s also going to be nice because it’s going to hide all of this equipment, but we’ll need to have good air flow for the heat pump to keep working properly. We’ll also double this area as a little changing room so guests don’t have to go inside the house just to get changed. We’ll also be upgrading some tech outside. I’m currently only getting 8 megabits per second in Wi-Fi, but I’m going to show you guys how we’re going to improve that to be over 300 megabits per second. Another thing I’d like to do is install some smart blinds in both of these openings in the gazebo because as soon as it gets, you know, towards the evening, like right now is 5:30 p.m. the sun is, you know, at an angle. I just talked about a lot of projects. The plan in this video is to try to get as many of these things done in one weekend. That’s my only rule, one weekend. It’s Friday 5:00 p.m. So, let’s see how far we get by Sunday night, starting now. First things first, I had to go shopping on a budget. You have to pay for those. Sir, you have to pay. I saved $169 per bag. Then, I stole some ferns from someone’s backyard. And I also got some free hoses from this other house, and I had an absolute blast doing it. Yes. Yes. Yes. I wish my story was that cool, but that’s not actually what happened. My best friend gave me all of those ferns, and my mom had so many hostas, she didn’t mind giving me a few. She even taught us a little something. YouTuber Maria. Oh my god. You see this plant here? How it’s all alone? Plants tend to multiply every year like this. So, you could dig these out and transplant them at your house. So, you get some plants and your mom won’t even notice a hole in her garden. My area here has one little problem that is going to make this job a lot harder on me. Remember when we did the paver stones? We kind of did our gravel base all the way to the fence. So now we have to shovel it all out so we could have some nice soil in the ground. So my goal for this area is to make it feel like a fancy resort, like a private little vacation, but in Montreal, Canada. Now, obviously, I’d love to plant palm trees or tropical stuff, but unless I want everything to die, that’s not going to happen. So, we’re sticking with perennials, which are plants that come back every year instead of annuals, which just die at the end of the season. The trick is to choose plants that work in your climate. That’s where plant hardiness zones come in. So, like I said, I’m in Montreal and we’re in zone 5. Palm trees, that’s like zone 9 to 11, I think. So, it’s definitely not going to happen for me. Another thing I didn’t think about until I visited a nursery to talk to someone is sunlight. I showed the man there some of my inspiration photos and he was like, “Yeah, those won’t last more than one season.” So, he gave me a list of plants based on how much sun each area gets, full sun, part sun, or full shade. That’s what I did. I went back home. I tracked the sun in my yard. Took pictures of my fence all day. I split it into sections. Turns out that sections 1 to four are full shade. Sections five to eight get at least 5 hours of morning sun. And I knew I’d be adding landscape lights in the middle of each fence panel. So, I left a little gap there when planting. Digging out the gravel was by far the hardest and longest part of this job. That’s why I like working with my kids. It keeps me motivated and they get to learn what hard work looks like. Most of the time it does take longer to complete the job. You got this. Keep going. And I get more questions than work done. But I think it’s a pretty fair trade-off. I found two old concrete bases from fence posts buried in the ground and there was no way I was digging those out. So, I just left them in place and planted around them. If you’re wondering what these grasses are at each post, I planted some Carl Forser grasses last year and so that’s what you see there. After I finished planting all the hostas and ferns, I went out and actually bought some plants. I spent around 300 bucks on 12 plants. So, yeah, landscaping ain’t cheap. If you don’t know where to start, here’s my advice. Go on Pinterest, save a bunch of inspiration pickics, and then head to your local nursery, find the oldest employee there. Trust me, that person’s going to be the best person to talk to in your area. So, we laid out all the plans and like any good team, we made sure to agree to disagree on where everything should go. [Music] If you thought I was just chucking gravel onto my neighbor’s yard, that would be funny as hell. But this is actually my side of the yard. I’m making a little path back here so the kids can build forts one day, and it’s also going to be easier to maintain trees growing into the fence. Good job, buddy. Let’s put it all the way up. One, two, three. Oh, is that heavy? Very heavy. Okay. Keep going, buddy. Keep going. Do you like the plants we planted? Do you like those flowers? It’s fine. It’s fine. I like it. You like it? [Music] Here. There’s going to be a light right around here. [Music] Okay, right now I just want to flip it. [Music] Break time. little hamburger. [Music] On this side of the pool, things were a little bit easier. I already knew it got over 7 hours of sun per day, so full sun plants only. Last year, I planted some liies, some lawn grasses, some lavender, and some little blue grass balls. But this time, we’re going for plants that hopefully grow bigger to fill that space a little more. [Music] You did amazing. All right. Now, we’re going to be working on I believe is going to be the biggest upgrade for the yard, and that is lighting. Landscape lighting, 12vt lighting. Don’t get me wrong, the plants look amazing. Now, it’s just a question of let’s get started with lighting. We’re going to be installing some lights all along the fence. At the middle of each fence section, I have a hole and we’re going to be putting in a light that will shine up. I also want to install another light here looking up between these two grasses towards the chimney. And I also want to install maybe one or two lights back here because this is the path and it brings us to the back door. So, it would be nice to have either a light here pointing down or maybe some path lights all along this path, which brings us to the pool area with the gazebo. So, I feel like I need to explain cuz I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of comments as to why I didn’t just use solar lights. 2 years ago, I bought a bunch of these solar lights and none of them work. I had about 10. Some of them stopped working after just one season. These are the cheapest lights you can get. 10, 15, 20 bucks each, but you might have to replace them every year. For this project, I’m upgrading the lighting on my entire property, front yard as well, but in this video, we’re just going to be doing the backyard. This is the reason why I’m not using solar lights, and I’m going with wired lights. I’m just a DIYer. I’ve never wired up landscape lighting before. So, I did go down the rabbit hole of research. Oh, yeah. I definitely did do a lot of research. So, I’ll try and sum it up in the next 2 minutes from the math, the watts, the wire gauges, the transformer. But after doing all this, it’s actually a lot simpler than it looks. And then we’ll get to installing everything. If you haven’t subscribed already, I’m trying to get to 100,000 subscribers before the end of the summer. So, if you could help me out with that, I’d very much appreciate it. Enjoy the video cuz the yard is looking so sick. For my project, I decided to buy three different types of lights. We have well lights, and these are going to be used to shine upwards. We have the wall lights, which shine downwards, and we have the path lights, which are just I mean, the word says it, it’s a path light. 2700 Kelvin is what I’m going to be using. These bulbs for these lights are 5 watts. This uses this little bulb, 3 watts. And lastly, these path lights. They also use this little tiny bulb in there. There’s many, many other types of lights out there. You could get spotlights, which are handy to, you know, maybe shine up into a tree, but for this right here, I felt I didn’t need spotlights. that this would probably be better just to get a very wide light. Everything I purchased, I purchased from Amazon, so you guys can purchase exactly the same things if you want. I tried to get things that have gaskets uh that are made with with glass and brass. We do need to keep in mind where we want to position these, how we want to position them, and then we’re going to start looking at wire gauges and transformer boxes. I drew this little map of my yard and now I know I need three separate cables and I’ll be calling these lines or runs. Let’s say I’ve got nine lights on this run and each one uses a 5 W bulb. So 9 * 5 that’s 45 watts total. You want to stay under 80% of the wires capacity. So I add a 20% buffer. That means I take the 45 watts and multiply it by 1.2 which gives me 54 watt. Then I measured the total length of that run from the transformer all the way to the last light and it’s about 150 ft. Now with that info, we can open up this handy voltage drop chart to figure out what wire size we need for 54 watts over 150 ft. It shows us that we should go with a 12 gauge cable. Here you could see the comparison of 16 gauge versus 12 gauge. Okay, so now that we know which cable to get, we need to look at the transformer. And the transformer is this metal box here. It is what powers everything. It’s what drops down 120 volt from our house down to 12 volts. So these are 5 watts and these are 3 watts. In total, I have 102 watts. I would technically need a transformer that’s rated for at least 128 watts. Just to be safe, I doubled it. I bought a 300 W transformer. Honestly, I think it was 25 or 30 bucks more than getting a 200 W transformer. So, I really just futureproofed my landscape lighting. Let’s get started. I installed the transformer in the pool equipment area since I already had power there. I’ll be adding a smart plug so I can control the lights from my phone and they’ll turn on automatically at sunset. [Music] Wiring the lights is pretty straightforward. You just have to pass the wire all the way to the first light. So, I roughly measured the cable by rolling it out and I cut it so I could now pass it behind the fence. Initially, I thought I was going to have one connection per light, but then I noticed the cables on each light were about 5 6 ft long, so I could have two lights per connection, which means less connections in the ground, which means less potential failing points. The nice thing about using fixtures with replaceable bulbs is that if one burns out, you don’t have to dig up the whole fixture. You just pop in a new bulb and you’re good to go. [Music] So, the connectors that came with these lights apparently are pretty bad. After doing some research, I found out that you don’t want to rely on a tiny metal spike poking the cable. What you do want though is a solid waterproof connection. Something that’s built to last. So, I’ll be using these. But the most important part is to use dialectric grease. Fill it up. And then I’m just going to do a bunch of electrical tape. There’s definitely other ways of doing this, like soldering the wires and putting heat shrink tubing over it. But I went with this method because for me, it felt like the best balance between reliability and how long it takes to install. Before taping it all up, let’s go test it out and turn it on. Three, two, one, on. Amazing. It works. [Music] And just to be even more overkill, I wrapped it all up a second time, making it super tight, and then adding dialectric grease in that opening. But after finishing the project, I found out that the best practice is actually to use these little guys. I’m not sure exactly why I didn’t buy them. I think it was because they were out of stock or maybe because I thought they were 25 bucks each. But now that they’re in stock, I definitely recommend these. They’re probably way faster to install and less messy to work with. [Music] [Music] All right. So, there we go. I just finished installing the four lights behind me. They’re currently on, but we can’t see them. So, I’m just going to turn off the sun for a sec. Amazing. I am so happy I decided to do landscape lighting. This is really, really cool. And now, let’s turn on the gazebo lights. Amazing. This is so sweet. Hey, Alexa, play some music. As a DIYer, I know what it’s like trying to figure things out for the first time. That’s why I decided to do some tests with the landscape lights at night because I had no idea how it would actually look in the dark. So, right now, it’s not to get everything perfect, but it’s to get the spacing right. And since it’s lighting for nighttime, might as well see exactly what we’re working with. [Music] All right, I think uh I think that’s perfect. Okay, I I got to tell you guys something. I don’t usually plan my projects as much as I did for this one. This one was a bit different because I wanted to do so much in such little time. I also wanted to teach you guys all of my learnings and the only way to do that was to be organized. A lot of this outdoor lighting stuff could get complicated fast. There’s a lot of things that you have to know and to choose from like the bulbs, the fixtures, the watts, the wire gauges, the transformer, the distances for each run. It got messy quickly. So, I organized my thoughts using Millanote, who also happens to be the sponsor of this video. So, Millanote is basically like an online corkboard where I can drag in all my ideas, sketches, inspiration picks, material list, to-dos, you name it, and actually see my projects start to take shape before I make 10 trips to the hardware store. This here is my main board that holds all of my backyard projects all in one place. I then have my inner boards that are like projects within my backyard project. This one here is for all my landscape lights. So, I have all my info, my notes, my plans in one place. I’ve got my checklist of everything I need to buy, my math table for total wattage and voltage drops, and this little section where I dropped in photos of all the fixtures I’m using so I can keep track of placement and spacing. This is where I sketched out my cable runs for the different zones for each part of the yard, and I added some notes in a table. It’s an online software, so I can see everything on my phone as well. So, I could literally walk around the yard with the plan open, checking stuff off the list, and use it as my main point of reference for everything during the project. If you’ve got a DIY project, a creative idea, or just want a better way to plan out your project. And if you’re not sure where to begin, Millote offers over 100 built-in templates for any type of creative work. If you want to try Millinote, it’s available for free with absolutely no time limit. You can sign up using the link in the description below. Big thanks to Milano for sponsoring this video. Now, let’s go finish the landscape light so we can move on to the pool pump enclosure. Let’s go. [Music] I set all the lights about 4 in away from the pavers with the top of the light shade level to the surface. I also packed down the fluffy dirt to make sure they stay in place. Once all the lights were in, I started hiding the cables. I cleared a bit of dirt around the pavers, laid the wires as low as I could, and pinned them down with a few landscape spikes. Then I covered everything back up with dirt. [Music] And to finish it all off, I spread about an inch of brown mulch everywhere. Mulch serves kind of a dual purpose. It doesn’t only just look pretty nice, but its main purpose is to help the soil retain moisture and not dry out like crazy in the sun. [Music] To wrap up the backyard, I ran the wires to the other two zones. One leading towards the deck and one heading out to the front yard. I added another light under the chimney. And I made it all look as clean as I did the other side by adding some dirt and mulch. [Music] Now that all the cables have been passed, I could finally bury all the cables under the Riverstone. I finished installing the lights under the deck, which honestly turned out better than I expected. And I also installed the first light on the front yard run. Here’s a little preview of what’s coming next. I left the connection exposed for now since I got a huge project coming up for our front yard. So, make sure to hit that subscribe button. Oh, look at that. The sun just came out. Now that the lights are done, we could finally move on to the elephant in the room, which is that pool pump over there. As you can probably tell, I already finished it. At the beginning of the video, I said I was going to complete everything in just one weekend. So, instead of cramming a bunch of projects all together and saying it took me three, four weekends, I decided to create a backyard transformation series. And so, this is episode one. So, in the next video, I’m going to show you how I built the fence around the pool pump area, the outdoor shower, and so much more. I also want to build an outdoor sofa, an outdoor kitchen. So, let me know in the comments if you like the idea or if you hate it. And make sure to click on the video for part two right after the teaser. [Music] [Applause] [Music]