How do go about making over my front garden myself

[SimLondon]

I hate my front garden and covet my next door neighbours garden (semi-d). Theirs has a nice flowerbed outside the house, a concrete path in front of the house and also down to the gate. A nice flat lawn with a few trees at the far end and a border of leylandi separating them from the road.

We have no paths at all :-( an overgrown bed without well-defined borders in front of the house and another in the middle of the lawn. A bumpy uneven lawn leading to a huge (unsafe to let the toddler near it) drainage ditch running the length of the lawn with a scraggly mixture type of hedge on the other side of the ditch separating us from the road.

I can't really afford to pay for a professional makeover but I can spend a few hours a week working on it.

Can anyone tell me where I start?

You know where to start...
Start with the thing that bugs you most - get rid of it.
Then move on to the next thing - then the next.
Before you know it you will have a horribly ugly garden which doesn't include the things you hated - BUT - you can plant daffodils RIGHT NOW and you can plant tulips RIGHT now and they will reward you in April and May and you will have a FLOWER GARDEN.

Once the mornings are light again and the days are long (April) you can do some work - and it's only evet bit by bit with a garden - never a one hit wonder.

Chop out and chop down the things you hate, plant flowers and go forward !!!

Fill in drainage ditch. Plant rose hedge this winter to mix in with scraggly hedge. Look on David Austin website and go to roses for hedging.

I like minimonty's approach a lot.

We just got rid of our horrible straggly hedge. Garden looks loads better without it, much more light. We dug it out ourselves which I expected to be a nightmare but was doable and very satisfying.

Personally wouldn't recommend leylandi. Grow so enormous, take all the light from your garden. Beech hedges are lovely if you want a hedge.

Good luck! It is really satisfying if you do it yourself. Remember to take some 'before' pictures.

Thanks folks - I really like the look of the rose hedges, and it seems that you can put a large perforated pipe in the ditch and cover it with gravel and then soil on top. I will take some before photos and put them up on the Internet, we bought this place a year ago and have refurbished the inside on a shoestring budget so just starting to think about the outside now.