17 Curb Appeal ideas | On a budget

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17 Front yard curb appeal ideas on a budget. Plus our front yard makeover before and after. From overgrown grass to colorful Spanish Lavender.

It feels like just the other day we moved into this house. But judging by our lack of curb appeal, it’s been more like four years.

This eye sore didn’t just happen overnight though. It started with the weeds popping up through the garden barrier. Then came overgrown monkey grass and faded mulch. It was the result of 4 years of sub par maintenance and the words “we’ll do it next year.” were said more than once.

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Next year finally became this year, but we had to do it on a budget! As much as I like those gorgeous before and afters of mature trees being planted and a professional landscaper being called in, this isn’t that.

This is two homeowners digging up giant monkey grass bushes and disagreeing about how much mulch is actually needed. (Spoiler alert. One of us was wrong.)

Along with 17 curb appeal ideas to get your own front yard makeover started.

Spanish lavender, black mulch and solar lights

17 CURB APPEAL IDEAS ON A BUDGET

1- Paint the front door

Painting the front door is an easy way to update the look of your home, on a budget. You can check out how we painted our front door and the materials used -How to paint a front metal door-

2- Add garage windows and hardware magnets

3- Update faded light fixtures using spray paint

We gave our garage an instant makeover by spray painting our garage lighting to a matte black color. It only took one afternoon and we masked off the area so we didn’t need to take them down. -How to paint faded outdoor light fixtures the easy way-

4- Solar lights

5- Decorative planters

6- DIY trellis with climbing vines

7- Bird baths

8- Stepping stones

9- Plant a tree with surrounding tree ring. -How to build a tree ring on a slope-

10- Add new mulch

11- Decorative garden fence

12- Window boxes and hanging plants

13- Bird feeders

14- Pressure wash the walkway

15- Add a new welcome mat

16- New cushions for your seating area

17- Clean up your old mailbox

Our brick column mailbox needed some help! So we cleaned it up, spay painted it black and added a door flag. -Old brick column mailbox makeover with flag

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YARD MAKEOVER – BEFORE AND AFTER

Plan your budget
Decide what you’ll be reusing (potting containers, edging, keeping bushes)
Tear out old weed barrier
Dig holes or pot new plants
Lay new weed barrier
Mulch
Place decor; bird bath, solar lights

At one point and time I actually liked our monkey grass! However, we had let it become overgrown and it was time to move on. We also decided to reuse our edging to save a little money in the budget.

We tore up the old weed barrier and weeds and planted Spanish Lavender along the path.

Tearing up the weeds and planting Spanish Lavender along the walkway

We secured the new weed barrier with garden staples and put back the old edging along the path.

New weed barrier and old edging going into place

After the edging was back in place, we mulched around our lavender and potted our new Mandevilla plants.

Purple Spanish Lavender with black mulch

Mandevilla’s are gorgeous vine plants that flower during the spring and summer. Since we have a large brick wall, we wanted some kind of plant or vine to fill that area. We decided to pot the plants in a container so that we could bring him in during the cold winter months.

Being that he’s a vine he needed something to climb on. We had two choices; we could buy a trellis or make a simple trellis. I had pictured a wood V shaped trellis connected with 2×2’s. The DIY project would have cost as much as buying one… until.

In the same aisle as the edging I found a pack of 6 long bamboo sticks for under $3. We bought some wire and made our own DIY trellis for under $5 each.

Mandevilla climbing a bamboo DIY trellis

Mandevilla in plastic barrel container with a homemade bamboo trellis to climb

We then added a bird bath and solar lights along the path.

This before and after isn’t as drastic as some. But that’s kind of the point with DIY projects on a budget. It’s a modest update that needed to happen and was one that we could do ourselves in just a weekend.

At times you make compromises. For example, we thought about edging the pathway with stone. But in the end we decided our money would be better spent on buying nice solar lights instead.

Front yard after with Spanish Lavender, potted Mandevilla vines, bird bath, black mulch and solar lights

Not only do we love our modest update so do the birds and bees! We hadn’t even finished our project when this little guy came to visit.

So who was right about the amount of mulch we needed? It was my husband. I was under by about 10 bags! We headed back to the home improvement store to get the extra bags of mulch that we needed, but isn’t that how home projects go?