$500 Transformed Our Lawn From Gross to Gorgeous in Just a Few Weekends!

For less than $1,000 we turned our disastrous yard into a beautiful desert scape that’s a joy to view.

We always had lawn maintenance problems. We talked about xeriscaping for a long time, but never quite got started. Then, last year’s drought killed everything. Green did return in patches once cooler weather and rain arrived, but our lawn was a worse mess than ever. Xeriscaping time had come.

First we did online research for native plants, pictures of other lawns gone native, the steps to take to prepare the yard and then pricing for sand, gravel and rocks. That done, we got started right away. We didn’t try to buy it all at once. We would go and get the amount of sand and gravel that we felt we could get laid out in a single weekend. If we finished early, we went and got more. We purchased plants a few at a time, so we could plant them at our leisure without having to maintain too many pots in the meantime.

The bulk of the work took us only two weeks, with the main portion of that work being done on the weekends. We’ve continued to add on since then, but the majority was done by the third weekend after we started. At that time, we had only spent about $350 for everything. We’ve bought more things since that time, but our total is still somewhere between $500-$600. Our lawn is approximately 200 square feet, about average for a subdivision.

This project involved a lot of physical labor. First, we mulched the trees and gave the mulch rock borders, using rocks from a previous project. Then we had to mark out the pathway and spray it with lawn and weed killer, since we didn’t want landscaping fabric on that portion. We put steel landscaping borders around the sidewalk edges of the yard to hold in the sand and gravel. Next we put down the weed blocker/landscaping fabric everywhere the path wasn’t.

We picked up the first yard of sand ourselves, but had the next 3 yards delivered, which saved time but added money. In my experience one yard of sand will cover between 40-50 feet at a depth of one inch. We used half a yard of limestone leavings for the path, then covered the rest with three yards of pea gravel, which we hauled ourselves. After that it was just planting and decorating with rocks and handmade sculptures.