I like what we have right now, a very large piece of property with the house somewhere in the middle.
Bigger backyard for sure. Typically, the backyard is more private. If you ever get the itch down the road, you could maybe put in a swimming pool. Can’t do that in the front yard. In my mind, the backyard, even if there’s a property line back there, could go on forever. When I was a kid, many football/baseball games spilled into the neighbor’s yard that backed up to ours. The front yard has a very definite end at the road.
We’ve got a 3 acre rectangle with approx 2 acres of back yard, so we have a nice barrier between the front of the house and the road. There’s some lawn, but mostly trees and flowers and shrubs. And over an acre of the back yard is wooded - our actual mowable grass area is less than an acre all told.
On a smaller lot, I think I’d go for similar proportions - more in back than in front, but enough in front to keep road noise at bay. Not that there’s a lot of road noise in the boonies where we live…
I’m with the majority on this one.
Currently my front yard is larger than the back. I wouldn’t want to be set closer to the street, but it would be nice if the lot was larger so I had more in back. In any case, the eventual goal would be no lawn, in favor of an urban garden. I’ve already used up the the back yard and have taken out the lawn on the small side front yard in favor of raised beds. Main front lawn is next.
It depends on how much traffic is on the road.
Busy highway, I want a big front yard. Big Rigs make a lot of noise roaring by.
Quiet country road. I want a big back yard.
Back! We enjoy our backyard so much and it would be great if we could put a deck at the back of the house and one of those kiddie playground type dealies. Plus more room for veggie beds that I can no longer manage, good thing there are young ones here. Well, younger than I am, anyway.
It’s funny how enclosed peoples’ thinking is about this topic. Why does a big front yard need to be grass? Why can’t a front yard be space for kids/dogs/gardens/a pool/a patio? Because people might walk past and see it? O NO.
My MIL has this same issue, she lives in SoCal and was gnashing her teeth about the needless lawn she pays a lot to have maintained. We sat down with a bunch of garden design books and magazines and she vetoed every single idea. The lawn prevails.
Far enough back to be a bit away from the street, but besides that, baby got back, no other way.
I have tried unsuccessfully for the last two years to get thyme and/or oregano to replace my front lawn. The grass always wins. Our front looks like shit because we are too poor to hire a service and too old and lazy too keep it looking nice. Luckily for us, our neighbors to the right spend half the year not living there, so their house starts to look abandoned, making our slightly overgrown mess look English in comparison.
Of course, you can sit out in your front yard. More and more people are doing so:
I’d vote for right in the middle. Backyard for pools and bbqs that I don’t want neighborhood kids or passersby wandering into. Front for casual socializing.
I’d prefer a larger back yard. I’d have one third of the property in front of the house, two thirds behind it.
I’d put my house smack in the middle, to maximize distance from the road and whatever’s behind me, pave over everything, and never look at either again.
We currently have 0.2 acres and find that’s entirely too much yard for us, but if I have to have one, I’d prefer to have more back yard than front yard. That way, the complete lack of work we do in the yard would be less obvious to everyone.
We have several neighbors who have put in nice sitting areas in their front yards. It’s nice to say hi and have a brief chat as you walk down the street, but I’m not a fan of sitting outside myself.
A bigger back yard is better if you want to expand the house to make it bigger. All towns have a house setback ordinance, the minimum distance which a building or other structure must be set back from the street, but the house can be extended in the back to hit the property line.
Can I get a bigger house instead? Yards are wasted space, I never use either. But if I have to choose, I’ll take the larger backyard. More privacy.
Before I decide on how big the front yard should be I’d want to know the effective range of a bouncing betty.
I prefer what I currently have: a city townhouse with virtually no yard in front or back. There is a very nice city park literally twenty steps down the street where I and my dog can frolic to our hearts’ content, and I don’t have to do ANY YARD WORK to maintain it. I do have a hardscape patio, but that’s on the side of the townhouse, enclosed by a tall fence.
neither just give me a terrace big enough to bbq on and where I could put a flower box or two on the second story and id be fine
It’s funny you say that. I prefer a smaller front yard and a larger back yard- which is exactly what I have now. But the front yard is a garden , not grass. It’s the backyard that has grass. But as far as why a front yard can’t be space for kids/dogs/pool/patio, some of that has to do with fencing. There are lots of places with fence restrictions that do not allow you to fence a front yard, only the back and there are another large bunch of neighborhoods where you could legally fence the front but it would look out of place because no one else did. People often want/need a fenced yard for kids/dogs/ a pool being than a 6 inch deep wading pool, trampolines
While I don’t have any issues sitting in front of my house ( we still have a stoop/porch sitting tradition in my neighborhood), that’s for when I’m socializing with the neighbors. I wouldn’t want to have a holiday BBQ in a front yard- I’d feel like I had to invite the neighbors.