April 27

Renovating Your Garden on a Budget

Introduction

Renovating your garden is tough when you don’t have the funds to do it yourself or hire a professional. If you’re experienced then the main barrier will be sourcing and implementing changes that are financially viable for you. If you aren’t experienced then you also have a knowledge gap that needs to be filled, yet you can’t pay for somebody who knows what they’re doing.

In this guide, we’ve included methods that you can use to renovate your garden that is easy to follow and, most importantly, can be done when you’re on a budget. Below you’ll find sections on the following:

  • Making a plan
  • Setting a budget
  • Recruiting helpers
  • Shopping around
  • How to save on plants
  • How to upcycle furniture
  • How to make the garden seem larger

If you need help with doing any of these, you’ll find what you need in the guide below. After reading, you should know the most effective steps you can take to bring the cost of a garden renovation down, sometimes by a significant amount. Where possible, we’ve included informative sources that provide more detail on mentioned topics and gardening methods and provide proof of any other claims made.

Let’s begin with how all DIY projects should start – by forming a plan.

Make a Plan

Make a Plan

Before you get your hands dirty, you need to come up with a plan that you’re confident with. Without a plan, you’re likely to settle on a plan of action that may change halfway through or use resources that don’t contribute to the final result, costing you both time and money.

If you’re the imaginative type, you may already see your dream garden renovation in your head. That makes this easier, of course, but you should still follow the below steps to ensure that your creative vision matches the practical limitations of your garden space.

Measure Your Garden

You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, so before you get any wild expectations about what your garden can look like, you should first measure it. Take all relevant measurements such as:

  • The circumference/perimeter of your garden.
  • The diameter/diagonal of your garden.
  • The height of the tallest furniture/structure in your garden, if applicable.
  • The required space for any specialized features you may want to be installed.

By keeping all of these measurements handy, you can buy renovation equipment that will seamlessly fit into your current garden. Write them down somewhere in sight and consult them at every step of the renovation. That way, you won’t lose money on unnecessary purchases and can manage your result so that it’s compatible with the garden you had when you started.

Draw or Sketch What You Have in Mind

Now that you’ve got the concrete details ironed out, you should make sure you have a plan for the creative side of things. Visualizing your garden may not be enough, so we’d advise you to draw or sketch the result you have in mind.

Your drawing skills may vary, of course, but this doesn’t need to be fine art. It should be able to show the layout of the garden in a way that you understand and appreciate, even if it might look like meaningless pencil scribbles to somebody else.

If you are skilled as an artist or you have architectural or land-planning credentials, you can go the more official route by making artwork or a professional diagram of how you want the garden to look when you’re finished. You could even do a 3D render if that’s in your ability, though even we’d say you’re overthinking at that point. You can find a guide to more sophisticated planning here.

The point is, make something that visualizes the garden you have in mind. Once you’ve done that, you can make it fit your current garden measurements to get the best possible compromise on what you want.

Set a Budget

Set a Budget

Now that you’ve got a working concept for what your garden can be, you’ll need to check your financials. While we’re renovating on a budget, everybody’s budget is going to vary wildly. That said, you likely don’t have too much to spare for garden design if you’ve found yourself here.

So why should you set a budget? Even when you’re not focused on saving money, everybody wants to get the best garden for the least amount of money, so having a budget is a great way to ensure you only spend how much you need to.

If you’re expecting your garden to take a long time before it reaches completion, you can spread the renovation costs. If you do that, you can choose to separate the budget by certain time frames if that makes it easier to manage your finances. There’s no need to rush and get your garden renovated in one ambitious month, and sometimes this can cost more than changing your garden piece by piece.

Recruit Helping Hands

Recruit Helping Hands

It’s time to start thinking about how you’re going to bring your dream garden into a reality. By now you should have a garden renovation concept and a set budget to build it. You don’t have to build it all by yourself, however.

Sometimes your project can have enough budget room to hire contractors or gardeners for help. If the budget doesn’t allow for hiring help then don’t worry, there’s a cheaper alternative…

Friends and Family

A great way to save your budget on manpower is to source it from your family and friends. As long as somebody you know has two hands and can follow directions, you can recruit them to help with your renovation project. You’ll likely have to act as a manager to them. That means showing them the garden concept that you want to achieve, whether that’s a sketch or a full plan.

Once everybody understands, you may need to also provide them with the equipment to get the job done. If you’re working with some friends who have tools and don’t mind using them, then you can save on equipment costs. Otherwise, it’s a good idea to have part of your budget set aside for the equipment they’ll use.

You’ll also want to ensure their safety. Professionals know how to take safety precautions but relatively unskilled friends or family may need you to give them a rundown of basic safety. You can find resources online, like this one for Australian gardens. It’s quite comprehensive and while it may come from an overseas source, we’re sure if you’re prepared for the dangers of an Australian garden, you’re all set for an American one.

Assuming a safe and productive working environment, it can be a fun project for you and your family or friends to renovate your garden. If they’re not doing it for free, you can still pay your friends or family somehow. This can be with money, and they’ll usually accept less than a professional stranger would, but it could also be a favor in return or some relaxation afterward. For friends, you can relax in the new garden with some beers that you’ve covered the cost for. For family, it could be products that they’ve wanted for a while, and now they have a chance to earn them by helping you out. 

That way, you get the extra manpower and save money while they get something for their time.

Shop Around

Shop Around

The surest way to save money on anything is to shop around. Oftentimes the largest and most popular retailer of a product or service can get away with higher asking prices. They’re the largest in that market with many people dependent on them, so they can get away with it.

Avoid this simple pitfall by doing your due diligence first. Shop around and figure out where you can get the products you want while paying the least money. If you’re stuck on ideas, check out the three suggestions below.

Recycling Centers

The cheapest way to get your hands on some great equipment is through your local recycling center. These are your waste processing sites and junkyards that keep all the materials that other people have thrown away. Check out the policies of your local site. Some of them will let you buy junk equipment you find on their grounds while others won’t.

If your local center is open to the idea, you’ll likely have to trek through the junkyard and find what you want to buy yourself. This is where those who engage in dumpster diving or gear restoration will have an edge over those who don’t because they’ll find it easier to find usable equipment and bring them back to presentable quality if necessary. Of course, a friend can help with this process too!

Thrift Shopping

If your area has many thrift or charity stores that stock furniture or other pieces of equipment you want in your garden, you should check those out too. While big brand supermarkets will have fixed prices on most items, many of the products in these stores are second-hand or donated, and so you can buy them for cheaper than you would in other retail establishments.

Shopping in thrift stores is its own skill too, so learn the best tips and tricks for finding usable equipment in these places if you’re planning on visiting often.

Online Bargains – eBay

You can also use the Internet to make your garden renovation cheaper. With the rise of online e-commerce, you can buy items through the Internet and have them delivered to your door. While you can often buy from manufacturers and brands themselves, the cheapest options tend to be buying from strangers who are looking to offload equipment that they previously owned, and so they tend to offer products or materials for lower price points.

One of the oldest and most popular sites for facilitating sales between people is eBay. Everybody’s heard of it and, by registering an account, you can buy items from enterprising individuals online. Similarly, Amazon allows you to buy from both brands and individuals selling products. With both, you should search around to find the cheapest options. eBay has an auction function too, so if you find a non-competitive auction you can bag some garden equipment for a substantial price reduction.

Save on Plants

Save on Plants

A garden isn’t a garden if there are no plants, so you’re going to need those. If you’re in an urban environment or somewhere where plant cultivation is more difficult, plant prices can get pretty high since they require experts who are expecting to get paid for their time. There are ways you can save on planets, however, like the three examples below.

Take Cuttings

You can help propagate any plants you already own by taking cuttings from them. For many plants, it’s possible to cut a part of them off and plant it so that more plants grow. Using this method, you can increase the number of plants you have for no cost whatsoever. All you need is the knowledge of how to cut a plant and how to successfully cultivate it into its own organism.

If you need some guidance when taking cuttings and turning them into a stocked garden, you can find resources online that help.

Swap Plants with Friends and Neighbors

Like with manpower when renovating your garden, you can also source plants from the people you know. Whether that’s family, friends, or just polite neighbors, you may be able to get some plants for your garden from them. If they ask for a price, it may be reduced since you are friends with them, or they may just let you have the plants for free.

Know somebody who’s an avid gardener? If so, they’ll likely have many different seeds that they aren’t using and should be willing to help you in your garden renovation.

Use Kitchen Scraps to Make a Veg Garden

Most of the vegetables and fruits that make their way into our kitchens can actually be planted and used to make a vegetable garden. These are more practical gardens that you can harvest from when the plants reach maturity, so how aesthetically pleasing they look will depend on what you plant.

By adding some vegetables or fruit to your garden, you get some groceries, then some seed material, and then a repeating source of plants, all for a single purchase. You’ll want anything that comes out of your garden to be fit for human consumption, so make sure you read up on the safety and maintenance required for a purpose-built vegetable garden.

If you have other food waste, you can also use it to make compost to help the growth of future plants.

Upcycle Furniture

Upcycle Furniture

There’s every chance that your dream garden has some furniture in it. Whether that’s practical furniture like tables and chairs or decorations like birdbaths, you can save money on all these through upcycling.

What is upcycling? It’s a play on the word recycling except, instead of throwing something away to be recycled per the usual processes, you instead take something you own that’s in poor condition and use it to create something better. Through upcycling, you can give an old piece of furniture a new life as part of your garden.

A common example is using a set of drawers as exterior storage or even planters. By giving an old drawer set a lick of paint, you can stash seeds or tools into the individual drawers to keep your gardening equipment organized. To make them planters, you can fill two drawers of a four-drawer unit with soil and add the plants to them, making sure the drawer is anchored open. Since you need the drawers to have room, you have to stagger them so they’re not directly on top of each other.

That’s what upcycling is. If you’re interested, there are many upcycling guides online for you to get lost in. In the meantime, stick around and check out some of the other upcycling examples below.

Paint Boring Brown Furniture

If you are planning to add any furniture to your garden, you should add another coat of paint. Most furniture comes in muted color schemes that are more at home in your living room, and that’s fine. When it comes to your garden, however, many of us prefer vibrant color schemes.

In those cases, you’ll want to take your brown, black, beige furniture and make it a new and exciting color. You may even have a color scheme planned for your finished garden; in which case you can paint any furniture to match the dream garden you have in mind.

Beachcomb for Materials

Beachcombing is exactly what it sounds like – combing the beach to find interesting stuff. Think of it like dumpster diving or junkyard hunting, though most of the items you’ll find on a beach are going to be more naturally occurring.

What can you expect to find on the beach? A lot of seaweed, no doubt, but here’s what you should look for:

  • Seashells – particularly textured shells like those of conchs and whelks.
  • Fossils – mostly ammonites and other small, swirly sea life.
  • Pottery shards – even better if they match your garden color scheme.
  • Drift seeds – small, pearly seeds that make great hanging decorations.
  • Driftwood – to be used as decorations or reinforcement for furniture.
  • Sea glass – shards of glass that are smoothened by the sea.
  • Buried items – There’s no end to what you can find buried at the beach if you bring a metal detector.

If you like the look of it and it can be used to improve your garden and the furniture inside it, anything you find while beachcombing can be used.

Paint the Patio

The same principle here applies to brown furniture. Outside installations like decking and patios are made from wood and stone that deteriorate with time. If you already have one of these installed and you want it to be part of your finished garden project, adding a lick of paint can help.

This not only covers unsightly marks and stains that may have gathered over the years, but you also have an unlimited choice of colors and even different paints that add gloss or matte effects to the finished project.

Remember that we often associate colors with temperatures too, so if your garden uses a cooler, blue-purple color palette then you’ll want to look at more muted colors when painting the patio and any other furniture nearby. Conversely, gardens using a red-orange color palette will want brighter, more striking colors that fit in better.

For structural and convenience purposes, decking and patio are often adjoined to the household instead of being at the far end of your garden. In that case, it may be a good idea to match the colors used with that of the exterior of your home. This allows you to take a decking made from wood or a stone slab patio and paint it, so it starts to look more coherent with the rest of your home.

How to Make the Garden Seem Larger

How to Make The Garden Seem Larger

Sometimes your dream garden is just too big for the garden you have. While you should have measured your garden to bring your expectations and reality onto the same page, you can still indulge in the feeling of a larger garden. With the right tips and tricks, everything from the yield capacity, seating capacity, or surface area of the garden can be maximized to your benefit. Take a look at four ways you can make your garden appear larger below.

Tiered Planters

In the section about upcycling, we talked about how drawers are often recycled into plant pots since the open drawers can be staggered. This allows you to have several drawer planters of various sizes that can all be exposed to the light and any moisture that they require.

That example of upcycling works because the planters are tiered. Adding verticality to your garden is a surefire way to increase its capacity, whether that’s the material capacity of its fruit or vegetable yield or just how large it looks to the untrained eye. By being economical with the space you have, you can fit many more plants into the garden.

Anyone familiar with gardening will know this isn’t a new idea, too. You can buy tiered planters from places where gardening equipment is sold or you can buy individual pots and planters and knock them together to create your own. The DIY option is almost always the budget-friendly one. Pinterest is full of ideas for tiered planters if you need inspiration.

Fold Up Furniture

When your garden is light on space, you want to limit the presence of furniture. While it often allows you to enjoy the garden you’ve made, it’s also valuable land that could be used to cultivate more plants or aesthetically pleasing decorations.

Much like tiered planters, fold-up furniture is great at giving you full use of the equipment without it taking up too much room. Deckchairs are the enduring example of garden furniture that’s lightweight, comfortable, foldable, and stackable. Just one of these is desirable in your garden furniture, all of them at once is the best-case scenario.

Having furniture that can fold away and store easily is great for getting rid of clutter around your garden. It’s also great for winter months where you may not spend as much time in the garden, and so the furniture will get left outside and deteriorate. If your furniture can be folded up, it’ll take up minimal space and can be conveniently and compactly stored inside or in a garden shed.

Diagonal Paving

The paving of your garden is often made from large, unwieldy stone tiles that aren’t great at saving space. They’re less expensive than many small-cut stones fixed together to make your patio, but these can be problems when you want to make a small garden appear bigger.

If a particular corner or side of your garden is covered in tiles, don’t worry about keeping its edge flat against the lawn. Instead, stagger the tile placement so that they make a diagonal pattern. Think of a typical four-sided diamond shape made of squares, where each side is pointed from individual squares but together make a visually satisfying pattern.

Along with awarding you more physical space to use for your garden, it often just appears larger to our eyes too. If you want to keep the patio properly separate for hygiene reasons, some recommend digging between the paving and the lawn and filling that with small, decorative garden stones. It’s wise to install a border to your garden sections as they can present a tripping risk, too.

Strong Landscaped Lines

A better strategy for the smallest of gardens, landscaping lines add clear and defined borders to the different sections of your backyard. This results in a neat aesthetic that appeals to our senses of orderliness and, in doing so, makes each part of the garden easier to appreciate for what it is.

Let’s say you want to maintain the three main parts of a garden – a patio, a lawn, and the garden area itself complete with plants. Having a small garden with these three sections mixed together can make each of them look diminutive. Instead, try to have a small patio section, closest to your house for ease of transport and seating, and then install strong landscaping lines to separate it from the greenery.

If you wish, you can also add even more landscaping lines to divide the lawn from a dedicated garden section, or even divide the garden into different parts for fruit, vegetables, et cetera.

How you organize the garden is up to you. What’s settled is that installing strong landscaping lines can be great for managing limited spaces and how they appear to the human eye. Landscaping lines can be scores in the ground that are filled with stones or more exaggerated wooden barriers separating each section, depending on how obvious you wish the division to be.

Summary

Summary

With that, we’ve covered many of the popular and useful ways you can renovate your garden on a budget. Here’s a brief summary of what we’ve learned in this guide:

  • How to plan your garden renovation by taking measurements and making a visual representation of your dream backyard.
  • How you set a budget and why you should keep it in mind during the process so that each part of your renovation is constrained by budgetary requirements. 
  • How you can cut down on manpower costs by recruiting from your friends, family, and neighbors.
  • How to find the best deals on garden equipment by visiting thrift stores, recycling centers, and traversing the online marketplace.
  • How to save on plants for your garden by taking cuttings, swapping seeds or saplings with friends and close acquaintances, and even using kitchen scraps to make your practical fruit/vegetable garden.
  • How to get more use from your furniture through upcycling. We also covered popular ways of bringing old, drab furniture into a new life as garden decoration and how you can source those garden decorations from the natural world, such as the beach.
  • How to make diminutive gardens appear larger or more organized through the use of strong landscaping lines.

With any or all of the above, you should now be armed with the knowledge required to make your garden renovation dreams a reality. Renovating your garden is a process that takes time and money, even when you’re operating on a budget. Because of this, there is every chance that you’ll look over the guide before you commit to your renovation plans.

Once you do, however, it may be a good idea to keep a guide like this close by so you can anticipate and plan every facet of your ideal garden. Remember that keeping to your budget is key and so, if you reach a garden you’re satisfied with and your budget is topped out, you should prioritize the budget plan over adding any fanciful bells and whistles to the area.


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