Walk This Way

I present to you another post in which we take advantage of something free to give our little plot of earth some much needed character all while adding functionality. Last May, as our neighbors were cleaning out their house in an effort to sell it, we acquired A LOT of miscellaneous items, like the little shelf I told you about a few weeks ago. Sitting in their garage, intended from some project that never happened, was a pile of red paver stones with a floral pattern cut into them. I like the way they looked and they were free, so we took them and let them sit in our garage for a while before we figured out where we wanted them to permanently reside.

As you can see from the photo above, the garden hose resides on the side of our house. And since most of the stuff that needs to be watered is in the back yard, we do a lot of walking back and forth in that area where I drew "X"'s. See where I am going here?? It really was a no-brainer.

We laid the stones out and walked back and forth on them to make sure there were positioned at a comfortable stride. Then Chris put on his work gloves and started digging. He used the screwdriver method -- trace around the object in question with a screw driver -- so that he would dig only the area where the stone would eventually reside. 

If you look real close in the photo above you can see the outline in the ground where Chris traced around the stone. Trace. Dig. Repeat. x9.

In case you are curious we did not put weed block paper underneath. Additionally, we have yet to fill in the stones with anything. I debated if we should put pebbles in as to keep the maintenance level down, or if we wanted to fill them in with dirt. This internal debate has since turned into procrastination. And the stones have filled up with all sorts of random yard debris, such a leaves. It's not so pretty. So that will need to be addressed in the near future. My thought now is that we will fill them with dirt and in time if grass happens to grow in them we can just weed whip them to keep it clean. And it will created a little bit of a secret garden feel to it like the photo below which happens to be from the DIY Network's tutorial on building a stone walkway...if you are interested in such information.

The cost on this project was just a little bit of sweat and we are very happy with the end result. The stones add so much character and functionality.