Jason Cameron: This desperate landscape belongs to Chad and Samantha Jewel. He’s a firefighter for the City of Jacksonville Florida and she’s a pilot for a commuter airline. Weekends on the ground, do not include working in the ground. So here’s the deal, the neighbors are leaving for work right now and we’ve got 8 hours to take this house from worse to first, so when they come home at the end of the day they won't even recognize it.

Here’s my plan, brick planter box will be demolished and all the plants tossed, in its place, two dozen new plants including bigger and more substantial shrubs framing the house. The wood walkway gets pulled up and replaced by natural stone. To frame the front of the house I'm building a custom gate then creating two lines of flowers and shrubs. The entire house gets painted plus I’ll install a big new cedar shutter to tie in the tropical look.

Tackle this kind of ugly walkway. We’re going to take those boards up. The pier, we’re going to get rid of that and the rest of you guys this is how it’s going to go, it’s overgrown hiding the house. We’re going to take that thing out.

That was all too easy. When you’re doing a damn old job like this not only do you need some serious help but you need some serious tools like this right here. This is a 5-foot long pry bar and it weighs about 25 pounds which is really important to have that weight when prying out bricks like this or any kind of heavy construction even concrete and what’s really nice about this is it got this long spade head on it with a sharp point. Now you can file that down for a nice sharp edge or you can leave it dull but what’s great about that is when you shove it into those bricks and get between the mortar you can pry that brick right up and it works great. So a good sledge hammer and a good pry bar and some friends, you get the job done in no time. Instead of using shovels or wheelbarrows to dig that all out that soil and plants come out in big chunks and speed up clearing the landscape.

One thing about a herd of paradise, it doesn’t do well with frost so that’s why we choose this location, closer to the house. Take one and dig man. They’re all sitting right where we need to go so you can go ahead and dig around them and then pumped them in there.

We’re going to start the walkway right now and it’s just like putting a puzzle together, you got to get all the pieces laid out. we’ll start putting them in place and we’re going to start with the biggest piece first which is right here that’s going up next to the house so were going to work our way back.

So this is called courtside flagging and we’re going to fill in the gaps. Installation of the gate is much easier, thanks to the sandy soil. I’m using a post hole digger then quick setting concrete poured directly into the hole to support the posts. Now the gates in, now were going to finish the screening on either side so its time to plant some pittosporum. There’s no surprise we got this house painted on a half hour I mean we got some firefighters here come on.

What do you guys think?

Samantha: I think its scary pretty. Yeah, it’s the prettiest thing I could ever imagined