Front Yard Makeover: Landscaping Tips & Before and After Reveal

This front yard makeover was a labor of love. It started with the exhaustive process of painting over the red brick, which instantly added a ton of curb appeal to our home’s exterior. But, we knew to give this house the glow up it deserved we’d have to do major work on the landscaping. Take a look at the before and after photos, and read the steps we took to redesign our front yard.

In another article, we provide a full list of the landscaping tools and materials we used for this project.

Removing the concrete walkway

Busting up and removing a concrete walkway was honestly 10 times easier than I expected. I budgeted an entire day when making our front yard makeover schedule — it only took a few hours.

That by no means diminishes how tiring this job is. You can buy or rent machinery like a jackhammer, however I used brute force and ignorance to bash away at it with a sledge hammer. There’s a wide range of sledge hammers you can buy based on weight, handle material, length, etc. I opted for a medium size and price option, which easily handled the job.

Hauling away the debris was maybe the most physically demanding part of this job. It took two trips loading up our utility trailer and unloading it at the dump and ending up totaling close to two tons —yes, literally TWO TONS.

As Mike Tyson would say: “My back is broken — spinal!”

I eventually filled in the hole left from the concrete with the dirt pile I had made by leveling the landscaped area, added some lawn soil and tossed some bermuda grass seed over it to hopefully patch in the grass seamlessly. Now we wait.

Clearing out old mulch, weeds, roots and more

While I over budgeted the time it’d take to demo the concrete, I grossly underestimated just how labor intensive and time consuming de-weeding the old landscaping would be.

The old landscaping fabric was somehow disintegrated ash that crumbled but also clung to the earth with the force of 1,000 bottles of adhesive. Once I was able to remove all the gross red mulch and fabric, I was set back by the 57 million roots that ran just under the soil top. Every time I dug into the ground with my shovel, I’d find a new root (a lot of profanity was said during this process) that forced me to stop and attack it with a combination of reciprocating saw and garden spade.

Our property is sloped so I dug as far as I could with manual labor to level out the ground.

This whole process took about a week of 6 am wake ups with four hours a day of hard labor. I got about 3 hours in each morning (it’s really effing hot here in Florida “spring”) and then did another hour in the middle of the day during my lunch break.

Should I have purchased or rented a machine-powered tool like a tiller/cultivator? Probably. But once I was clearly past the halfway point and realized how much I messed up, pride kicked in and I was determined to just tough it out.

Leveling the ground

There was only so much that could feasibly be done to level out the area where we were landscaping. The property significantly slopes down from the house toward the street, and completely flattening the area would have looked weird and out of place.

I dug down probably 4-6 inches in the highest spots and maybe an inch or so where it sloped. Once it was leveled I lightly wet the dirt and packed it down. You can use a tamper if you want, but Emma said “God gave you two tampers at the end of your legs” so that was the tool I was told to use.

Installing brick border and pavers

I measured and marked the distance out from the house with spray paint and a 2×4 to keep my line straight. The line didn’t have to be perfect, though, because the shovel is far from neat and makes the whole area a mess. Next I went over the line with our trencher to set up an easier first dig with the shovel.

Once I had the general area dug out I added a thin layer of paver sand. This allows you to gently mallet your pavers into place without cracking them and also stops them from shifting or sinking with rain or other inclement weather. I used a 36 inch level to track the paver alignment as I went.

We opted for a brick edging paver look. I don’t have some deep reason why we went for this look, it just looks nice and complemented the other elements of the landscaping.

Laying down weed barrier fabric

The internet has a lot of opinions on what product you should use to block weeds. Some say weed fabric, which is what we used. Others suggest cardboard or newspapers. This is dealer’s choice here, so if you’re working on a front yard makeover, too, pick whichever you feel is best for your soil.

I started in one corner and walked end to end cutting strips with scissors, then I used garden fabric staples to secure it to the soil. You should be able to push these directly into the ground, but you can tap it into tough spots with a mallet.

The key here is to use enough that there are no gaps where weeds can penetrate. When starting your next row, overlap the new line over the previous fabric by at least an inch. Continue until the entire area is covered.

Arranging plants

Oh, hey, Emma interjecting here with the only part of the project I helped on: picking the plants.

The only trees we left in the front were the two Japanese maples that were already living their best lives, and the rest we ordered from Garden Goods Direct (note: this brand supplied the plants for us to share on Instagram, but we genuinely loved their process!)

I wanted mostly smaller shrubs in neutral colors so they can grow in and give the English cottage vibe we’re going for in the exterior. There are two knockout rose bushes on the opposite side of the Japanese maples to even out both sides, and then the rest is filled out with the little shrubs that will grow a maximum of three feet high and hopefully flower by next spring!

Okay, back to Alex.

Applying mulch, gravel and stepping stones

With the plants in place, we filled in the rest of the landscape area with brown rubber mulch. We went back and forth on this and did a lot of research into rubber mulch. Finding a definitive answer about the pros and cons of rubber mulch was impossible. So I’ll lay out what most experts suggested.

The obvious pro is that it lasts A LONG time. Like, an entire decade instead of regular wood mulch, that needs to be replaced every spring. After all that hard work, the idea of not touching it again for a decade was really enticing.

The biggest con is the price. It’s about 10x more expensive than regular mulch, which adds up in a large area.

The deciding factor is that rubber mulch is much heavier than regular mulch and doesn’t shift from rain and wind. We live right in the heart of hurricane country, and I could just see one summer storm wiping out the flower beds. No thank you.

Also, we put in a flower bed in a previous house and the lack of gutters created an ugly water drain line in the middle of the mulch. We would have had to install a french drain, which would have added days of additional labor digging out the trench and hundreds of dollars in materials.

For the walkway, which was three feet wide, we used 16×16 inch cement pavers. These pavers are HEAVY and really difficult to shift back and forth to get the right positioning. Like the paver edging, we used paver sand underneath it and a mallet and level to lay them.

Final Touches

We’re ecstatic with how this turned out. Emma gifted me with solar exterior lights for father’s day, which I of course installed about 10 seconds after opening the box. We’ve also added a pot to store our hose in when we’re not using it.

Eventually we’ll look into an irrigation system. We don’t have green thumbs, so we need something to remember to water the plants when we inevitably forget. We’ve got a few other small things we want to do out here, but we’re thrilled with the before and afters we got from this front yard makeover.

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