Rock On-Walk On

When Josh and I went to England 4 years ago, he fell in love with a walkway made out of rocks that we saw at a castle ruins site in Scotland. I remember him saying "someday, I'm going to build a rock walkway like this" as we walked over these ancient rock patterns set in the ground:

This winter, he set out to do just that, and created this rock walkway between the deck and the cement steps on the backside of the house:

(I blogged about it HERE --click link to read an older post)

Over spring break, the last week of March, he decided to make another, much longer rock walkway connecting the opposite side of the deck to the bridge on the far end of the yard. (There are two bridges that cross over the ditch that separates our yard from Grandma and Grandpa T.'s yard.) It took us 4 days to complete the project, and we all worked on it together as a family.

The boys all spent a day finding flat rocks around our driveway and the area surrounding the front side of our house and piling them up by the deck. Josh created the outline of the walkway on the first day. He measured the area (width and length), marked it with stakes and strings, and then spray-painted a line in the grass along the string.

On the second day, Josh brought home a sodcutter from work and cut the grass out of the inside of his designated lines. Then he cut the grass into shorter strips and set them outside the area. The boys brought over rakes and shovels, and began shoveling out excess dirt so that the walkway was flat and even.

Then Josh began the placement of the rocks. He put sand on the dirt, raked it even, then set in bigger rocks. The younger boys put smaller rocks in the gaps between some of the bigger rocks, and when an area was complete, Ammon scooped more sand over the top of the set rocks and swept it between all the cracks. At the end of the second day of the project, we had completed a 1/3 of the walkway.

The next two days were spent repeating that rock placement pattern, completing another 1/3 of the walkway each day. The boys also had to retrieve more rocks around the place, because we ran out of their previous supply on the 3rd day. This photo shows the four layers, from L-R: dirt, sand, rocks, more sand:

As Josh and the boys worked on the rock walkway, my job was to move those sod rolls and lay them out on areas in the yard that needed grass. The biggest area was next to the deck stairs adjacent to the north side of the house. When the foundation was prepared for our house two years ago, the area all around the house was left rocky and bumpy from the excavator. Last summer, we cleared out all the rocks on the north side of the house and leveled the dirt and planted bushes, but there was still an empty spot between where the grass ended and the decorative shrubbery began. As seen here:

So I raked the dirt, and removed rocks, and leveled the ground, then laid down each individual sod roll so that it fit in the space. It took me the last two days of our project to get that area filled. There was also another area in the yard between the Ash tree and the north side of the house that Josh had dug up last fall to put in a water spout, and I worked on doing the same thing for that spot, too (raking, removing rocks, leveling, and laying sod). The sod transplant has really taken well, and now the north side of the house looks like this:

Josh's rock walkway is truly a masterpiece. He did an outstanding job. It is so beautiful and impressive, and I love how he used local rocks surrounding our home to beautify and define the space in the backyard.

As seen from the deck:

As seen from the bridge: