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DIY Landscaping ?s
For anyone that's ever done it yourself, I could use some advice. I'd also love to know what you wish you had hired out for, and vice-versa.
We have a small front yard -- trapezoid shaped with 13' along the street. 25' on the side near the house, and 35' deep.
There is a mild slope -- about 1' per 13' across the yard and the entire yard slopes about 6' down from the house to the street.
My basic plan is this:
-Pull out existing bushes along fence line (using neighbor's truck)
-Build 3 small retaining walls. One along street, one in front of house (rose bushes here) and one to level out a small patch of lawn, where I'm going to use some cement lawn edging as well.
-Get rid of cement front porch/steps & walkway (very uneven & broken)
-Widen driveway/walkway area using large paver stones & mulch -- from street to front door, and in front of house to backyard.
-Build wider, wooden front porch/steps
- Plant drought-hardy bushes on left side of yard, some in front & perennials too. (Zone 5)
Here's a photo of now:
Re: DIY Landscaping ?s
we are doing ours ourselves. Just about everything will take longer then you expect it to!
and with this d a mn heatwave we are having I wish we could hire people to do the work for us. Though now we are at the easy part of just planting things. We used a lot of boulders, close to 3 tons worth, and 18 yards of dirt, and planted a ~15 ft tree. Its a lot of work but we saved a lot of money on labor
I also recommend a using a sod cutter, that saved us a lot of time, and we also rented a tiller cause the ground was too hard from being all clayish.
Good luck!
We're DIYers and we don't regret it one bit. It can be a lot of work and will take longer than you thought but it's worth it in the end. We just redid a 50'x7' flowerbed this weekend by tearing out the 3' tall weeds, digging out the 5" of gravel/soil mix (they never installed an edging), and finally getting to the plastic underneath. Then we installed a brick/paver edging and retaining wall. Earlier this year we tore out a large rock wall and redid it including a 40'x2' long flagstone fill-in with polymeric sand (to fill in the area between the rock wall and our driveway). Then we have another 1200 lb of flagstone we're going to put in a part of our yard that is heavily walked and very shaded. We're going to add moss between the flagstones.
Seeing as you are from Denver I'd advise you against using pavers for a driveway or sidewalk. Yes, they look very pretty but most of them can't stand up to the harsh winters. Depending on your base you can have a lot of popped pavers from the freeze thaw cycle, the colors used in concrete are destroyed by salt, there is always ice in the cracks, and shoveling on them is difficult. We have more than one friend who has used pavers for their driveway extension and/or front sidewalk and they regret it dearly!