Transforming Tired Front Yard Into Modern Showstopper! | Great Home Ideas

Jason and Tara revamp a dated front garden and facade into a space with tons of street appeal. Jason works his magic on the garden, adding a circular lawn feature and a variety of stunning plants. Meanwhile, Tara revamps the driveway and facade, bringing the outside of the home up to date and ensuring an amazing first impression every time someone comes to visit!

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.

▶ Subscribe: https://bit.ly/3hxN7d5

They say you never get a second chance at making a good first impression, but when it comes to the front of your house, it’s making first impressions every day. You can color up, clean up, give it a bit of a makeover, and start a fresh. And the best thing about it, it’s not as hard as you think. This house, well, it’s a classic example. The owners have put heaps of time and effort into it on the inside, but you certainly wouldn’t know it on the outside. You know that same mutton dressed up as lamb? Well, this little house is the exact opposite. We got a cry for help from the owners, so we answered the call. Hello, Carmelina. Hi, Tara. Hi, Jason. How are you? Great house. Thank you. Even if it isn’t finished, but it’s not finished yet. How long have you been here? About 6 years now. Yeah. When Carmelina and her husband bought this place, they were keen to fix the interior with extensive renovations, which included knocking walls down and a brand new kitchen and floors. The results are just stunning. Now a few years on, the front of house fix up is a distant pipe dream with two active kids and Carmelina working a full-time job. Carmelina, what plans did you have as far as colors go? We wanted something um probably modern in a gray, dark gray um maybe some white um edging just to, you know, give it some street appeal. I reckon we could turn this from the ugly duckling into the beautiful swan to match the inside of the house. Gorgeous. And you know, they say it’s all about first impressions. So, if you skip off for the day, I reckon we’ll make a good first impression on you. You come back later. I can’t wait. That would be fantastic. All right, we got to get to work. Head off. Make it happen. This is truly a blank canvas. We’ve got an ailia, a half dead rose, and a half dead tree. Now, this is called an orchid tree. If you look at it closely, I can explain why it’s half dead. It’s a deciduous tree, so it should be covered in new leaves right now, but it’s dying back. And trees usually die from the tip back. So, all this here is never going to recover. And if you look at the trunk, you can see the bark saw loose because it’s shrinking inside and this is falling off. So the humane thing to do is let this guy go. [Music] [Applause] [Music] To lift the look of an old driveway like this, you might think about maybe going over it, maybe even replacing it. But to be honest, in most cases, you can probably get away with just cleaning it. A pressure hose like this will do the job nicely. You can get it done in around an hour for a driveway of this size. It comes up so well, almost as good as new. Trust me, you’ll kick yourself soon. If you walk up and down the street here or pretty much any street in Australia, you’ll see the garden beds simply just hug the fence line and maybe across the front of the house. Well, we’re not going to follow that formula in straight lines. We’re going to do a circle. It’ll make the lawn more interesting and the garden beds narrower at the front and wider in the corners. [Music] Now, even though it’s called a turf cutter, it’s a pretty good dirt cutter as well. I’m putting a head of course of pavers around the outside of this lawn, and I want it to sit flush with the grass. So, we went around once, got rid of the grass. The second time, I’ve dug a little trench. So, the saw comes out nice and easy, saving me time cuz I’ve already paid to hire that. [Music] Lucky for us, Carmelene has already had the house rendered. This was an old red brick house. Now, with this smooth coating, almost looks modern. Now, it needs a coat of paint. Now, what we need to do first of all, you can see here when I rub my finger under here, you can see all that sand that falls away. If that goes into your paintwork, it’s just going to give you a pretty shabby result. So just use any wood offcut to smooth over. It can be pretty confusing knowing which paint to use for which surface. So for the outside, I keep things simple and just use weather shield. Now the great thing about this paint is it’s designed for the outside. It’s designed to last. And it goes on a whole range of different surfaces. You can paint it on metal, so you can use it for your gutters. It goes on timber, so you can use it for your barge boards, even your window frames and front door. And it also goes onto masonry and onto rendered surfaces like this. Now, because this is a pretty porous surface, I need to seal it up. And also, I’m going for a really dark gray paint. So, I’ve tinted a one-step primer undercoat. That’s just going to make it easier to paint and give me better coverage. It’ll also make the paint last longer, so Carmelina won’t be having to repaint this house every 5 years. Now, I’m paving a circle, so I can’t use a string line to get my heights or my lines right, obviously. So, what I need to do is do it by eye. If I pick up my level, not use it as a level, but use it as a straight edge and make sure that all the pavers are touching it. [Music] I know they’re on the one plane. And if I do that all the way around, I know it’ll marry in and look a million bucks. [Music] Usually when I talk about pavers, I say bigger is better because the large format is what’s trendy at the moment. But for a curve like this, you need to use a small PA just so where they butt, you can get little joints. If they are big long pavers, you get great big triangles in between each one. Now these are bought off the shelf at Bunnings. They’re $17 each, which works out to be roughly about $50 a square meter. But out of one square meter, you’ll do five linear meters of header course. and you’ll do 10 linear meters if you did them on edge like that. Now, I’ve almost come full circle and I’m just about to butt up my two ends. If you want to avoid all cuts at all, what you need to do with about a meter to go is lay them out dry. You can see here I missed by about 20 mil an inch. So, what I’m going to do is just fudge them. Put them all a couple of mil apart and to the eye. You won’t even notice it and you’ve avoided the cut. You can see here how dark and rich this color is. It’s called Monument. It’s one of my all-time favorites. It’s from the Dulux color bond range and I think it works so beautifully on these places. It’s a very popular fashionable color right now. But the good thing about it, it’s actually a neutral and because it’s so classic, it’s going to last the test of time. It goes with pretty much anything and I think it’s bringing this house right up to date. Has great street appeal. There are a few little tips to getting a really even paint job. So, you always work to what they call a wet edge. That means you try never to let that side dry. Load up your roller fully. Just start a little bit of way and then work back into your wet edge. And then just under here where you’ve cut in, just go across. Do the same at the bottom where you’ve cut in. join it up and then instead of just leaving it like that, which is kind of a little bit all over the place, you always roll up. So get your roller, just very lightly roll it up, roll it up, roll it up. And there you go. That’s the way to get the most even coat of paint. And as you can see, I finished now on the wet edge. So I’ll keep going. Tara, Dennis, what do you think? I think it’s ridiculously hot. And I look like a gr. And you still look a million bucks. I love the color. It’s cool, isn’t it? I love it. Monument. It’s classic and popular. And we’ve tied it into the garden. And I’m going to do the same to the front fence. But what about the door? It kind of disappears. Well, it does. So, I thought we could make a real feature of that. And I’ve heard the lady of the house likes green. Oh, nice. Tie the door into the garden. Well, there you go. That could work. [Music] Now, my steppers to get into the lawn are a contrast to that very formal dark PA. They’re kind of a man-made natural looking stone. Now, they’re a contrast to that, but they’re actually going to blend in with the mulch in the garden. So, the circle is going to be the thing that pops and not the path that gets to it. Laid them out dry, got them spacings right, and then laid them on a good stiff mud. We wet the back so they stick and they should be here for a generation. [Music] Now, we’re bringing the soil in, but you can see we’ve already placed out the pots and the chair because they’re things that I’m not going to move, and we wanted to make sure we had the right look. The soil mix, it’s got heaps of organic matter in. It’s like a adding compost to the existing soil, which was pretty ordinary cuz it’s been under this lawn for many years. [Music] The front of house is looking amazing so far, but what is letting it down is this old handrail. It would have looked great in its day, but these days we’re going for the modern look, so it doesn’t quite fit in. So Dazzler’s just cutting away the old one. And we’re going to replace it with a Merbal post and a very simple handrail, which will let the star of the show shine, the front door. And for that, I’ve gone for Carmelina’s favorite color. It’s a beautiful green called olive preserve. [Music] That’s fun. [Music] You see carports like this everywhere in the BBS and for good reason. They’re cheap to put up and let’s face it, they work. And trust me, on a day like today, the shelter is such a welcome relief from that harsh sun. The only problem is they’re not very pretty. So, I want to dress up the end with a very simple screen. Now, what I’ve chosen to work with is Merbau. It’s a red kind of grain timber. It’ll contrast beautifully against the monument color of the house. [Music] Now, the first thing I’ve done is had each of these slats cut to length. Now, I’m pre-drilling at both ends. [Music] This is a standard size carport. Once the family cars in here, trust me, there’s not a lot of room to move. So, I’m not putting a side screen in. Carmelina’s got young kids, and you know what’s going to happen at some stage, those doors are going to swing open and crash into them. So, I’m dressing up the end instead. It’s going to create a really nice flow and have the added benefit of not seeing down the ugly side of the house when the gates open. I’m using screening timber. It’s slightly narrower than decking timber. It’s also slightly cheaper, which is a bonus. And the great thing about this is it’s dressed all the way around. It doesn’t have these ugly ridges on the back. So, if that’s to the back of the screen, obviously you’re going to see I don’t want that ugly side to be shown. So, this one looks good front and back. What I am using this for, however, is the side plates. And I’m fixing those ridges to the side of the carport. That way, you won’t see them. Now, with that fixing plate in place, I can add all of my slats. Now, working with what I know, wallpaper, well, you know, if you don’t hang the first piece straight, the whole lot’s going to go pear-shaped. Well, in this case, when you’re doing a screen, the first one is not level, the rest will go out of whack. The other good thing about raising it slightly, it means you can hose underneath. Just makes it a little bit easier to keep neat and tidy. For the plants, we’ve gone with sun loving everywhere because this front yard doesn’t have much shade. Now, if you look at the plants, you’ll see a lot of white. Even the tips of these euphorias are white. And that’s just a contrast like the chair, the front of the house. It’s the reason why the blinds look so good is because the house is so dark. And you might notice a few copper things like the underside of the leaf, the stems of the front hedge, and even these little copper spoon succulents that are in the pot. or tying you with the merb. So if you’ve got a color scheme for the house, you can match your garden to it. Probably one of the trickiest things to get your head around is what’s the garden going to look like in a year or two. You plant things that you bought in the nursery and if you do it to scale, you think, “Okay, these are little and they’re little and they’re little. So which one goes at the front and which one goes at the back?” Well, you need to read your tags and find out how big things get. Now, this little lavender, it’s called Pacific Blue, I like it because the flower stem stand a long time, but the plant itself will be close to the ground, so it’s good at the front. The Indian hawthorne, well, I reckon it will make a cracking little ball at about a meter tall. The salvia will stay about 60 to 70 cm, and then it’ll go up to the crepe myrtle. So, you’ve got scale here towards the house. And the difference between getting it right and wrong is you look at a garden a year or two later and it looks like it’ll need replanting if you’ve got it wrong. Okay, so now that the slats are fixed off on both sides, come and have a look in the middle here and see what’s going on. Look at all of this banana bendy action. It’s pretty normal, but the way to rectify it is to grab yourself a stud and work from behind. So, this is nice and strong. It goes in the center. You need to level it up. [Music] And then again, starting at that bottom board, just fix that one in place. Pop in a packer. And then with the next board, you can wiggle it around to make sure it’s level and fix that in place. Then keep going all the way up to the top and your screen will be perfectly straight. Finish it off with a couple of coats of clear stain to seal the deal. So nice. I love this. Getting there, isn’t it? Pretty gardens. I like softness. This is great. You got lavender here and my favorites. I love hydrangeas in my hydrangeas. Good. I’m more into the construction obviously. I like the fact that the border is gray. Ties in with the house. The black pots, the gray pots. Gives us height because this is a very flat deck. It is. So, gets us up. The magnolia, they’ll be fine cuz that’s more like a raised garden bed than a pot. They’re that big. And then the white chair really pops. You would want to come and sit here. Yeah. Well, it’s the front yard and I reckon the more inviting the front yard, the more you’re going to talk to your neighbors because you know what I think the stroke of genius is? The round. I would never have thought of that. That is brilliant. Soft. It just cuts off all of those hard angles. Sorry, I lost it when you called me a genius. Your letter box and your house number. Well, they really do set the tone for the place, don’t they? So, I think if you want to smarten things up, you could at least start there. Now, it’s very simple to make your own house numbers. I mean, of course, you can just buy them like this from the hardware, but you could go one step further and make a whole number plate, which looks very fancy. Now, the style of your place really dictates the kind of style of the numbers. You can get some that are really fancy and curly. We’re going for that modern look, so we’ve got a very slick edged number. And just for the backing board, I’m using ply. You might already have something like this lying around in the shed. I’ve painted mine to match the house. I want everything to tie together nicely. So, in that vein, I’ve also got some of the Merbau I used for the screen. These are just the offcuts, and I’m stacking them up and just fixing them from the back with screws. [Music] [Applause] [Music] For the house numbers themselves, you just want to make sure they’re evenly spaced. And of course, that depends on the number of your place. But just once they’re all lined up, it’s a good idea just to pre-drill. Stops the timber from splitting. And then you can just finish them off with a hammer. [Music] Tada. That’s not bad, is it? Looks quite designer at a very good price tag. Go give that to Jace. While the team finish off the planting and they’re doing an amazing job. It’s amazing because I don’t have to do it. I’m going to tackle this front fence. It looks a thousand times better painted already. And I’m going to take Tara’s lead and fill these panels in here with Merbow. I’m going to make a simple frame which I’ve painted so it’ll disappear. You’ll hardly see it. and then clad the front, the top, and the back. So, it’ll look good from out and inside the garden. I was going to clad the front, the top, and the back, but sitting over there and looking at it, I actually like the fact that I haven’t done the back. It saves me on Merbau, which is probably a couple hundred bucks, 15 sticks. Saves me on time, and the fact that you can see through it, it makes it a little bit lighter than the rendered wall. So, I think it’s positive. Saving money, saving time, but it looks better. Win-win. [Music] Oh my goodness. This is just amazing. It’s just so beautiful. Thank you so much. What do you like the most? That bench looks really comfortable and just the plants are amazing. I love magnolia. Um, just amazing. Truly beautiful. We finished it for you. We’ve done this. Absolutely beautiful. What a transformation. Would this have been the color you would have chosen for? I love this color. I wouldn’t have gone this dark only cuz I’m scared of this color. But it’s beautiful. It’s really modern. So, what we were saying, people don’t embrace the dark colors enough, but if you go for it, you got to go for it. And look how amazing it just makes all the Yeah. Just brings the plants like just lifts everything up. greener the plants pops, the wider the flowers pop. That crepe myrtle winter flowers is going to look amazing. It’s beautiful. And your front entrance, the whole house just looks so much more welcoming. Yeah, it’s gorgeous. I like the Merbau. I like the red and the Merbal cuz it lifts from the roof tiles. I mean, there’s not much we can do with those. So, having that red kind of flows through. So, you’ve kind of got elements that actually tie it all together, whereas before it just didn’t really kind of work. Exactly. No, it’s beautiful. But you’ve done the hard work for us. You kind of had all the base. Right. Now, as far as maintenance goes, it’s a tough job. Yeah, but if it’s as hot as today, do them morning and night. These plants have just been moved from their little pots into this big garden. It’s a wide world for them, so they’re a bit nervous. No worries. If you get them established, then you can start to back off on the water. You know, he’ll do a driveby in 6 months and just make sure you’re doing that. It’ll be It’ll be gorgeous. It’ll be gorgeous. I love it. Thank you so much. It’s our pleasure. Amazing. Thank you both of you. Enjoy. Enjoy it. Look after it. All right. Job done. See you.