"I'm DIY obsessed and transformed my backyard into a 'luxury resort' for £20k"

3 months ago

A “DIY obsessed woman” has transformed her backyard into a hotel style luxury resort for £20k (AUS $38k).

Jade Strang, 30, started getting into DIY when she was a child and is in the process of totally renovating her 90s home.

She says she's taught herself to do everything - because she doesn't "overly trust" tradespeople to do as good a job as her.

Her latest incredible transformation involved the backyard at her family home in Northern Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, which took her around 15 months.

It was a basic garden with a forest of trees but now it has a renovated pool, artificial grass and a pergola.

Transcript

00:00Two months ago I bought a 90s home and the tiles were driving me insane, this is what it looked

00:04like before, so I decided to put floorboards down. I had three people come out and quote for both

00:09floorboards and polished concrete and all three quotes were between $17,000 and $19,000 and that

00:16just was not in my budget. It was like $7,000 over what I expected it to be, but we do have 110

00:22square meters of floor that needed to be fixed. And besides I'm really glad that we went and did

00:26the floors ourselves because it was really fun to do, it was an awesome skill to learn and we

00:30saved some cash all up which was a bonus. So this weekend all we had to do was lay the skirts down,

00:35we've got the painter coming on Monday. So once the painter comes the skirts and the walls will

00:40be a nice fresh clean white and this house is going to be so beautiful. I cannot wait to redecorate

00:45this entire space so make sure you press that follow button if you want to see more. We're

00:49renovating our million dollar home and this is part three of our pool renovation. And just quickly

00:53in the last video I had someone get mad at me for saying it's a million dollar home. That is not

00:57a flex, unfortunately this is the reality. You spend a million dollars on a home and you still

01:01need to upgrade it. The plan for today was to start building planter boxes for our retaining wall that

01:06we built last week. Unfortunately we've had to rip up our deck instead. This deck was so rotted

01:11there's no way it would have held up the weight from the planter boxes. So keeping on with our

01:14theme of do it once and do it right, we're going to rip up the deck and rebuild it. We have to take

01:19these screws out one by one. So I kind of cheated and I took the kids balance board so I could use

01:23it as a little seat to save my knees. And to have a little fun of course, we have the whole family

01:28building the deck today. We're all in on the job or demolishing should I say. And how smart as my

01:33beautiful fiance he's creating a drill bit from scratch. So we can tear apart this deck even

01:38quicker. But we want to save the materials because we're going to reuse them. Yes you guys also hated

01:43that when I said it in my last video that I was reusing materials. Look how rotted the treated

01:47pine is. It is literally just falling apart. Our strategy here is to reuse the planks. So we're

01:52stacking them and then numbering them. We're just going to write a number on every single plank so

01:56we can pop it back in the right spot. We're just going to rebuild the frame. I don't love the color

02:00of this deck but I mean it's better just to repurpose them and spend that money elsewhere.

02:04Again look how rotted this is. Literally just falls apart. I definitely do wish I spent the

02:09weekend building planter boxes but unfortunately this needed to be done. And with every reno comes

02:14something unexpected. So make sure you budget for that. I always budget for the unexpected but I

02:18didn't budget for something as big as this. This was our deck before. Look how many hundreds of

02:22screws there are. And you can quite literally see that the deck does need doing. But we were just

02:29turning a blind eye. Whoops. One step forward, 10 steps back. This is what our deck looks like right

02:35now. You can see the first part of the deck has already been replaced. We've only been here three

02:38months and it doesn't look like it was done that long ago but the rest of the deck is still quite

02:42rotted. So I'm not sure what happened there but this is what we're currently dealing with.

"I'm DIY obsessed and transformed my backyard into a 'luxury resort' for £20k"

Category

Transcript

Recommended