Our stone walkway

I’m so excited to share this project with you!

I know it’s probably not that exciting to you, but it’s pretty awesome to me and my family and I’m very proud of how this project turned out.  I’m also sharing this to possibly inspire you or someone else who has a project they want to do but think that it’s impossible.  Trust me, I had no clue what I was doing and things turned out pretty good, so I say “Go for it!  What are you waiting for? You can do whatever you set your mind to”.  

Okay, enough of my pep talk.  But really, you can do it.

So a quick background…My husband Michael had this outdoor shower installed over 15 years ago.  The crappy thing is that it was attached to the back side of our house with no stairs leading to it.  If we wanted to use it we would have to walk all the way around the house, and we never did.  So for years we didn’t even attach the shower head or turn the water on, it just sat there.  But last summer when we were having a whole new deck built, made perfect timing to ask for some stairs leading to our outdoor shower!

We were all excited to use this outdoor shower again but the landscape looked terrible.  Who am I really kidding?  There was NO landscaping, just overgrown bushes, ivy and dozens and dozens of ugly weeds.

I put off doing anything out there because it was just overwhelming.  Where the heck do I start ??  But this past June I decided to go for it, dive in and get it started.  My vision was a spa-like-oasis-outdoor-paradise-vacation-feel.  Peaceful.  Inviting.  Naturesque.

My vision was clear, but it didn’t come easy.   Landscaping is damn hard work!!  All of the digging, racking, moving heavy wheelbarrows full of dirt, lifting bags of stones, pavers, digging holes to plant and realizing exactly why where we live is named “Rocky Nook”. There are freaking rocks, everywhere!!

No wonder all of those landscapers are in shape.  What a workout!! Not to mention the elements; weather, sun, rain, intense heat, etc.  It’s just NOT an easy job and I give SO MUCH credit to anyone who works in this trade.  God bless you.

So here is what I had to work with….SO many weeds!

I started by clearing the area where I wanted the walkway.  I removed several inches of soil, trying to smooth it out as evenly as I could. When I say it’s backbreaking work I am NOT exaggerating!

I decided to use lots of the soil to build a mounded area along one side of the walkway where I could plant lots of part-sun plants and ground cover.  I added landscaping edging as well.

I found a ton of red bricks on the side of our house, perfect to line the other side of the walkway.

Originally I envisioned slate pavers to use as the “stepping stones” but then decided to make it more indigenous to where we live and use what we have.

Enlist my 2 daughters help and we were able to collect many large flat rocks from the shore.

I laid the rocks out to make sure we found enough to reach the shower.

I would do some planting whenever I needed a break from the heavy lifting.  I was even able to transplant several plants from our yard which worked out great and very budget-friendly!

I lined the walkway with weed fabric and added a good layer of pea stone.

Time to start my stepping stone pattern.  AGAIN!   I can’t tell you how many times I lifted and moved around those heavy stones!

Once my stepping stones were placed and level, I added many bags of river stones I bought at Lowes along the entire walkway working between the large stepping stones until it was covered to my satisfaction.

I installed a bamboo garden fence I found at Home Depot to cover the space under the deck.  Much better!

I laid grass seed along the brick side of the walkway and prayed it would grow….. and it did!

Time for all of the plantings and details and several weeks later after lots of sunshine, water and growth…

SO incredibly proud of this project and beyond happy with how this came out and exhausted but oh so worth the blood, sweat and tears! Excited to see how it changes over the years.

Thank you for stopping by.