Insane front yard makeover EMBARRASSING TO BEAUTIFUL Starter home updates

Have you ever had a project that you planned on getting done but it just sat on your to-do list for months, months, and years? Well then you will totally understand my dilemma here. I have been dreading tackling these front flower beds. I just never really knew where to start and we're finally getting it tackled today. Along with giving the front of the house a little facelift, we're going to be freshening up the back porch, using some chairs that are out there, up here, lots packed into today's video. I hope you enjoy. And if you happen to be new here, hello, welcome. I'm Keri Lynn. I share DIY home projects, turning our starter home into our forever home. I love homemaking, day in the life vlogs, cleaning, just a little bit of everything. If you enjoy any of that, don't forget to hit that red subscribe button and let's go ahead and dive right into today's video. I am going to start off by re-staining the front post here because they're just looking a little, they don't look horrible, they're just kind of fading a little bit, which does happen here in Florida, the sun, the weather, it's crazy. So I'm using the Valspar Stain and Sealer for the porch and deck, and I'm just going to touch these up. This is the color Canon Brown. It is so beautiful. I would recommend if you're going to be staining over something else, use the solid color, but all I had was the semi-transparent and it still did just what I wanted it to do. Just, you know, kind of brighten them up a little bit, not brighten them, it actually darkened them, but you know what I'm saying. It just made it look a little bit more even is what I'm looking for. Just the color to be even again, and this is just a really inexpensive fix. Really quick while I am working on this before I move on to the next little thing, I did want to give you guys an update on the plumbing issue. I know that on my Sunday's video, that video was talking about how we had like major plumbing problems and I was like super upset, you could see my frustration. That video was actually filmed before the one that I posted on Friday. My videos got a little out of order waiting on brand approval. Sometimes that happens, so I just wanted to clarify. Our plumbing issue was fixed, it ended up being a way cheaper fix than what that guy had quoted me. It ended up being just the vent pipe and he did replace it and we have not had a stinky smell in the house since, so we've been completely fine. But I did end up replacing our flag because it was all torn up and now we're going to go out back and freshen up that space too. I have been on the hunt for a new patio set, specifically a conversation set like this A huge thank you to Cheetah Living for partnering with me on today's video. This is the three piece Acacia Wood Bistro set. It comes with two chairs that swivel 360 degrees and a really cute accent table as well. It has that boho vibe that I've been going for while still feeling very simple, clean and modern at the same time. And in my opinion, this is the type of set that goes really well with any type of style. So if you're someone like myself who changes things up quite often, you know that this set is going to last a really long time. Also, they did come put together. How amazing? You do not have to sit there and spend hours assembling. You simply open the box, pull it out, get your cushions in place and you can start styling and utilizing this set right away. And as you can see, each chair comes with a really thick cushion for the seat, the back cushion and then two of the throw pillows for the sides. And I'm not exaggerating when I tell you this is hands down the best quality set I've ever owned in my life. As soon as I opened it, I was like, wow, like this is nice. It's heavy. It just feels like great quality wood. It feels like it's going to last forever. Y'all know how it is. It's hard to come across really great quality furniture these days. So when I tell you it's good quality, I'm telling you, I'm not just exaggerating. I actually have their sofa too. Cheetah Living has a couch that I got a couple of years back and it has held up so good. So it's not just this patio set. I just think Cheetah Living in general, their products are very well made. And not only does the wood tone and the rope detail look amazing, they're also very functional. I love that they can actually rotate 360 degrees. So whether we're having a conversation underneath the porch, watching TV, turn towards the house, or if we want to watch the kids play in the pool, we can simply turn and rotate however we want without having to move furniture around or anything like that. So this was definitely the biggest selling point for me. If you are in the market for a patio set like this one, that is great for smaller spaces, a good front porch set, great for a smaller back porch or even a pool deck, this is going to be a set that you're definitely going to want to look into. I'll be sure to have the link down below along with Cheetah Living's website so you can check out all the other furniture that they have to offer. And a huge thank you once again to Cheetah Living for sponsoring today's video. I'm going to go ahead and get some laundry started. I've been trying my best to stay on top of this and wash at least one load a day, but let's be real, it's more like two to three loads a day at this house. Between two adults, two kids, and three dogs, we use a lot of laundry. Towels specifically because of the pool and stuff I'm assuming, I don't know. I just feel like we cannot keep laundry under control around here, but I am trying and that counts. So anyway, moving on. The next day, Dylan and I went to Lowe's. We got this wild hare to go ahead and re-landscape the front yard. The thing is, we were going to hire some friends to come do it and then Dylan and I were actually having a conversation on the porch and he's like, I don't understand why you want to hire someone whenever you're really good at this kind of stuff. He's like, you'd kind of do this for a living. Why don't you just try it? I think what it is is overwhelming because it's such a big space and if you have ever done any type of gardening or landscaping, then you know how incredibly difficult this can be. It's a lot of work and I needed help and so I told him, I was like, I would love to do it. I just don't think I'm going to be able to handle it by myself and he was like, well, I will help you and I was like, I know you would help me. I just don't like to ask for help and I know he's my husband and before anybody comes at me and is like, what do you mean? You're scared to ask for help. I'm not scared to ask for help. I just don't want to ask for help. Unless it's like a physically demanding job that I physically cannot do on my own. I'm not asking anybody to help me with it. I'm going to figure it out on my own. But although this was physically demanding, it wasn't something I was incapable of doing. I just didn't want to do it by myself. So I was like, oh, I'll just hire it out. And then when we got to talking about it, he's like, that's so dumb. Like, you can do this. Like, we just got to figure out what plants will survive up here. We'll do some research and we'll do our absolute best to make it look good. And so that's what we ended up deciding to do. Not to mention with our recent plumbing problem, although it was not as expensive as we thought it was going to be, it was still very expensive. And so we didn't have the extra budget, home budget, to put into hiring someone. What cost us about $1,000 to fix and redo would have cost probably about $3,000 to $4,000 to hire out. I'm assuming. I don't really know. I never got a quote. I ended up canceling because we had the plumbing problems at that time. So since we had a little extra still, I was like, well, OK, we'll try it ourselves. So here we are doing it again. And I have done this area before. That's actually why all these plants are here. But I did it by myself. And I think that's why it didn't turn out as good. I just didn't do enough research. And a lot of the plants that I did plant died. So fingers crossed. Y'all better say a little plant prayer for me, please, because I really hope that all this survives. We've been keeping up with it and watering and so far so good. And we're about to hit, well, we are in rainy season now. If we could get some rain would be great. But I think all the plants will do pretty good. I feel pretty confident. Also, I did want to go ahead and mention all the plants that we decided to use, I will have listed in the description box because I cannot pronounce the names of half of these. You know that plant names are so odd. Why don't they just name them like Sally or Joe or something simple? Why do they have to have like try solitus or, you know, some, I can't even say that. And I just made that up myself. Anyway, here is the load, the second load, because we ended up going back to Lowe's to get more mulch or we went, okay, first we got all the plants. Then we went to Lowe's to get the mulch. And then while we were there, we realized we didn't have enough plants. So we grabbed a couple more. We needed way more plants than what we thought. We were totally underestimated how big this space was. Okay, here's a little rough layout before and after mulch. It's going to look so good once everything's planted and the brown mulch is so pretty. It's going to look amazing. This is one of those moments where you have to trust the process. I will tell you, I did cheat just a little because I'm not really like a landscaper. So I did take a photo of the front of the house and I did put it into chat GPT and asked for some, I don't know, like landscaping ideas, plant layouts. And it did help me a lot because I'm not gonna lie. I was stumped on this area and what to do because these two spaces are totally different shapes. This one's very long and narrow. The other area is very wide and short. So I needed help as far as the placement went. And that helped a lot. So I used that as a guide and we went and picked out all of the plants ourselves. And Dylan helped me. He helped me pick out all the plants, which was really fun. I will tell you though, we did end up buying houseplants without realizing that they were houseplants. I googled the plant name and it was like, oh, these are great for shaded landscapes. So I was like, oh, perfect. Get home. I sent my mom a picture, the ones that Dylan's putting in the ground right now. Those are the houseplants. On Google, it did not say anything about a houseplant, but my mom's like, oh, I have those in my house. Those are the ones that stand straight up at night. And I was like, what? She's like, yeah, those are houseplants. I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I've planted a bunch of houseplants in my flowerbed, but they honestly, they're doing really well. It's been a little over, I think it's been a one week since we planted everything and it's all doing great. And honestly, I feel like these plants have already grown a lot. We do get full shade up here, except for like right here is the only time during the day where we get a little bit of sun and that's it. But it's very short lived because it's when the sun's going down. So this was actually in the evening when we were doing this. And so we probably get about 10 minutes of sun out here. That's about all. So just enough to kind of give the plants, you know, what they need as far as sun goes. The rest is shaded all day. So that was something we had to keep in mind the whole time we were looking at plants was, you know, do they grow well in the shade? Are they full sun? Sun plants, because some of them, you know, they won't survive up here if they needed sun because there's not enough. Also, let me just say, I apologize in advance. My voice is kind of messed up. I do have a cough. I've been sick for the past couple of days. I got that summer cold, y'all. It hit me like a ton of bricks. It's been awful. I did want to share that something we decided to do was put some of the plants together to make them a little bit more fuller looking instead of having them all separated and super symmetrical. One thing that I've noticed about landscapers, and like if you want something to not look like amateur, if you want it to look like you know what you're doing, professional, I've noticed that like a lot of landscaping is not super duper symmetrical. They have a lot of layering. So you have like your smaller plants in the front, the medium, and then the taller ones in the back. And I feel like everything looks really good together because it flows nicely. But if you try to put everything like spaced out evenly and just like in a straight line, it kind of almost looks like it did before. If you remember, I had all the green plants lined up like perfectly spaced out every foot and it just it always looked like whoever planted that did not know what they were doing. So this time we kind of spaced things out and made it look full without looking, I don't know, like we tried too hard. And I think it looks really good so far. So this was like the first whole setup. At this point, I actually had to go run and grab the kids because they were with my sister-in-law all day. And while I was gone, Dylan cleaned this whole area out by himself. So I came back and this was like ready to be planted. This was a huge help because this was probably the worst area. It's very large, as you can see. But there's a lot of roots in here. So he worked super hard to get all that stuff out. And then when I got home, I went back through and just kind of laid everything out where I felt like it was going to look good together. This definitely took some time and new placement. But eventually we kind of figured out what looked the best. And we kind of just went for it. I mean, worst case scenario, you have to like replant something. No big deal. You can see now the sun's starting to set. It's starting to get a little darker outside. But we were determined to at least get all the plants in the ground. That way over the next couple of days, I could work on getting the weed barrier, getting the mulch kind of laid out where it needed to go. But we did end up discovering that we were short on mulch. So I did end up having to go back and I'll share that in a little bit. But there were some moments like even though Dylan cleaned out a lot of this and got a lot of the roots out as we were digging on this side, the roots were so bad. Whatever plants that they had here previous to us. Oh my gosh, they were terrible. I mean, I know it happens, but they were like thick roots. They were dead because they broke pretty easily. And they weren't like attached to anything. But they were just so there were so many roots and rocks and just like debris. Whoever lived here before us would like bury their trash. I know it's absolutely terrifying and horrible. But we were finding all kinds of stuff. I found, you know how many cars I found? Little toy cars. They're not from us. Whoever, like I said, whoever lived here before, they would just bury stuff. It was kind of odd and very disturbing. Actually, as a matter of fact, anytime we dig in our yard, I freak out. I'm like watching carefully, making sure we don't run into anything and that we don't want to see or run into. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so scared. And I don't know why, but this area for me like freaked me out because, like I said, we kept finding things in the dirt. And there was a lot of glass, broken glass. So something you just had to be really careful of, which is why we really didn't let the kids come out here and help us too much. Caden wanted to help. He was like all for it. But I was like, no, we're going to get this done ourselves. Like I said, if we had purchased this house from the jump or like built this house and it was our home and we knew there was nothing underground, I'd be fine with it. But I hate when the kids play in the dirt here because you just never know what you're going to run into. It's all starting to look super good. And this is when like the vision starts to come to life. And it's like, oh my gosh, like we actually accomplished this. I truly would not have been able to do this without Dylan's help. Like my vision, his hard work and determination on top of mine. Like it's just like we are a power couple when it comes to stuff like this. And we killed this. I'm so proud. We got all this done in just a couple hours. And obviously we didn't finish. We have a lot of work to do still. But this was a huge stepping stone and really exciting to get to this point. The next day I did get some of the weed barrier in place. I did run out for the second section, but I'll share what I did for that area in just a little bit. But for the weed barrier, we found that planting the plants first and then laying this out and just cutting out like a little X into the weed barrier was the easiest way to lay this down. I do think this can be easier. I feel like if you have extra hands, it's much, much easier. One thing I also did not have was the stakes. I ran out. So I only had a couple and I was just trying to use those to help hold things in place. As you can see, it was very windy. So the weed barrier kept flying on me and it was so frustrating. I did my best until I could get some help later on. But getting this part done was just like you can really start to see how good the plants look. And when it has like a solid background. So wait till y'all see what it all looks like with the mulch. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. So like I said, I got this in place. And then at that point, Dylan got home from work. I went ahead and started pouring out all the mulch just in the different areas that I knew that we were going to like spread it out. I just poured it, left it, and then we're going to work together to spread it with our hands and stuff. Our rake actually broke during all this landscaping. So we had to get down and dirty and try to do this our best. And also like this type of mulch is really easy to spread because it is thick and it is lightweight too. I love this bark mulch. It's my favorite. We have it all down the side yard and in the backyard as well. It just holds up really well. And I think out here because this is full shade, it should keep its color really well. I will tell you it does fade over time. It looks a little bit more like dark black grayish at some points. But it looks pretty good. But we did run out. So I had to run back to Lowe's and I had to grab 10 bags. So my daughter and I went and did this. And we actually finished up that one square of landscaping by ourselves, which made us so proud. One thing you will notice over there in the background is there's some mulch because like I said, we ended up running out. We didn't have enough to spread. But I wanted to point out that there's some areas of the weed barrier that look like plastic. And that is because since I ran out of weed barrier, instead of having to buy more, I actually just used the mulch bags to lay down. I've done this in the past in the backyard and it worked really well. So I figured, you know, why not? In the areas that I kind of didn't have enough of the weed barrier to spread out, that just kind of filled those gaps and it should work okay. We also have some weed and grass killer to spray if we need to. There's obviously going to be some grass and weeds that grow up on the edges. So we plan to hopefully keep that under control with the weed and grass killer. Look at all the work we did. All that big old pile of stuff we put in these bags. Figured we'll reuse them. Heck yeah! Girl power! So all these bags were pretty heavy. They were filled with dirt and leaves from that one area that Dylan cleaned out. So I just used the mulch bags to fill those and we're actually going to utilize the scooter to help us carry it to the road. It was much easier than trying to tow all these individually and we just thought this was so funny. Now that I have the new patio set for the back porch, I can now bring these chairs back up front. These are my favorite for up here because they're comfortable and I feel like it's nice to have a nice comfortable chair to sit in while the kids are playing up front. So we put those back up here and then I'm going to go ahead and blow off the driveway, making sure everything looks clean and polished and then I'll share with you guys a before and after in just a moment. But man, I am so glad that we tackled this together. I feel like it was just one of those projects that I was just intimidated by and this is just proof that you don't have to be. You just kind of put your mind to it and get it done. All right, I'm just wrapping up this cleanup a little bit and then I'm going to show you a before. So just a quick reminder, this is what this front area looked like before we got started. So great potential, clearly. It just needed some love and attention. So here's what it looks like now. All right y'all, that is going to be it for today's video. I will have all the plants linked down below along with all the products used and the cheetah living chair so you can check those out. A huge thank you to all of you guys for tuning in and watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope it gave you lots of motivation and inspiration to tackle your space. Don't forget to let me know what you think in the comments. Don't forget to like, comment, share, subscribe and I will see all of you guys in my next one. Bye y'all.