How to Turn Your Backyard into the ULTIMATE Outdoor Entertaining Space | GARDEN | Great Home Ideas

you know it's only a generation ago we ate every meal inside and you came outside to go to the toilet morning boys morning mr hodges pretty proud of themselves first time ever they've started work before me cause i'm the doer anyway this little area is about as inviting as doing your tax return have a look at the table it's not even meant to be outside so it's going to look even worse in another season or two but there's a few things that you can do that we've all seen before and a couple of materials that you've never seen that we're going to put in here and completely transform this backyard keep digging don't give me mr hodges that's my father but before we can create some magic we've got to get rid of the old concrete now here's a skip bin tip don't mix your rubbish concrete can go with brick and rock put like we like and it'll cost you a lot less so this is the space we're working with it's got its good points and it's bad points good points it's got these three walls so it feels quite intimate and you can turn into a courtyard bad point at the back of the house the ugly paling fence and the fibre of the shed so we're going to screen them off with a new technique that's going to look fantastic put some pavers on the floor but that's not all we're going to build in some raised garden beds and some built-in furniture a little bit like a chase lounge and the best thing about having built-in furniture is it takes up less space so you've still got a massive dance floor here where you can get footloose but the first thing we need to do is paint that fence because you're going to be able to see through the screen and you don't want to notice that so these are my little raised garden beds and it's going to have the seating inside of here and i'm staggering my joints so i've got one joint here and one joint over there it's just like brickwork it's called stretcher bond when they're overlapped like this it's a lot stronger than if they're straight on top of each other that's the weak point where walls and retaining walls can break this ties it all in so really i'm just doing brick work but it was treated for now because this is a raised garden bed not a retaining wall by putting a screw in on a 45 i can tie the two courses together if i do that in every corner it'll be strong [Applause] [Music] we all know treated pine's one of the cheapest materials to work with and i really like it but i don't like looking at it too much but when you dress it up it can save you thousands from footings or brickwork or block work or something like that and this is one of those examples here i'm going to clad it all so you won't see it and we're going to trick it up with a floating bench that going on there nice and tight it's kind of like showing you the goings out of a magic trick because this really does look like it's floating when it's finished and as you can see and i've no feather weight it's doing its job [Music] well i've done all my carpentry and this is the timber that's going to sit over here hiding all the tuglines but i'm not going to put it down just yet because i need to pave underneath it now for my screens i'm using a brand new system from whites it's called screen up and it's so clever i've seen people spend heaps of money on screens and they fail because they've put them together the wrong way or the spans are too great and all the timber twists and warps well their posts are made out of aluminium and they're powder coated so they're not gonna rust and they're not gonna fade there's two different footings there's one here that you can mount on top of a wall or straight on top of pavers or brickwork or something like that and there's another one that's got a big chunk of rio on the bottom of it so you can set it in concrete for a free standing fence straight through your lawn if you like [Music] you have these little spaces they slide in between each of your boards meaning your gaps are perfectly right as you can see it's a pretty good system but at the moment it's not perfect if you look down the line you can see that this one here is bowing out and if you look down these lines you can see some of them are greater than others well how do you fix that without having another big post in the middle easy with one of these aluminium sliders that comes out of the post if i screw this to the back in the middle i can draw them all in so they're on the one plane and if i use the spacer and take it out at each gap i can get all my gaps right as well just a couple more timber screens to put up and this courtyard is really starting to take [Music] shape now we're into the paving if you want your pavement to last you've got to do it properly the first time that means starting with road base whacking it down so nothing's going to move my plan was nearly perfect but whacking underneath where the bench is going to go is old school style [Music] we're going to lay the pavers now normally i would start at the entrance to the paved area which is off that back step but it's only 1.2 meters and somewhere here there's going to have to be a cut i'm going to make sure it's there rather than anywhere else because i want to make sure i'm perfect underneath my chair as you walk down the stairs you're gonna see in there and if i had a little cut running around these corners it would look awful as i work my way towards the stairs i'll find out whether i need a cut it might work out good but it might not and if it doesn't it's minimized to just that one metre [Music] there really is no better surface to put down under a hard wearing area like this because you're going to be sitting here there'll be table and chairs if you had a lawn you'd have to move it all the time plus it would wear out where you were always walking pavers if there's a problem later on you can lift them up and relay them where if it was a concrete slope it's down it's down forever you know that saying too much of a good thing well if the timber went all the way around it wasn't broken up that would be exactly the case i'd be putting up so we're going to break it up with a couple of these screws now they're from whites as well and they're made out of a special steel which is called oxyshield gives you that corrosive finish but doesn't go any further than that so unlike a car that rusts and then you can stick your finger through it this will never break down anymore but it will constantly change with the weather they're simple to put up grow something on it you put a mirror behind it you can paint the fence funky color when it's just gonna stick with plants [Music] [Applause] and finally you can cap the bench [Music] and now all the hardscaping's done we can start to green things up [Music] with raised garden beds like this it's pretty important that when you're tipping the soil in you just firm it up a bit you don't need to compact it like you're paving on it but you do want to take out a fair bit of the air if you don't in a couple of months time you'll see the root balls exposed of your plants because the soil sunk and no one are like that i definitely don't want to screen off our new screen but i am going to put some plants in to soften it these guys here are called hedge bamboo they're smaller and easier to manage than other bamboos and they'll stay nice and thin like that if they do thicken up you can just take out some of the shoots so you still see the timber behind it some ferns to soften our little piece lily i think i'll put a bamboo there in the corner and we can start planting probably my favorite native climber is hardened burger they're flowers from winter into spring and you might even get a little bit through summer so when your gardens look pretty bland when it's cold and there's not much in the garden that's giving you a show of color you can depend on this but what i like about it most is even when it grows up a fence or in this case the trellis it stays nice and thick and healthy down the bottom it doesn't leave you all these ugly runners so it's a great scream and even better flower and our job's done just a few key new features and i'm pretty sure you'd never know what was here before [Music] well the screens definitely set the scene perfectly hide in the ugly bits like the outdoor dunny and the paling fence the best thing is you know that they're structurally sound and built correctly because you can buy all the different components and as those hardened burgers grow up the rust it's going to look even better in time and the fire well when you finish watching better homes and guns there is no better television to stare at danny high five oh yeah

Channel: Great Home Ideas

Views: 2,297,893

Keywords: Great Home Ideas, DIY, Food, Cooking, How To, Lifestyle, Lifestyle Design, Gardening, DIY Hacks, DIY Tips, Furniture Hacks, Better Homes & Gardens, BHAG, Tara Dennis, How To DIY, How 2, entertainer's makeover, outdoor entertaining space, outdoor entertaining makeover, backyard makeover, Jason Hodges, Adam Dovile

Id: vRrCk4qXfd0

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020