Remember a few weeks back when I said I tackled some heavy lifting projects? Outside of our garage door to the yard there is a stone pathway landing.  It was installed over landscape fabric, but without any sort of gravel base.  Over the years it has sunk. A lot.  As is my typical M.O., I didn’t take a good before picture.  Actually, as is HIS typical M.O., Mr. Midwood got straight to work and started ripping the path out.  In the picture below, you can see what it looked like on the left hand side.

Oh, do you only see grass?  That is how sunken and overgrown the path was.  We are in and out through this door all day long and by the middle of the summer the grass is worn away and a mud pit develops.  many of the existing stones were too small so we swapped out some larger pieces of stone from our wall and other areas of the property.   After we laid out enough stone loosely on the grass, we dug down about six inches, sloping away from the garage.

We had plenty of pea gravel in the landscaping to reclaim and use for a base.

Next we started dry fitting the stone for depth and adjusted the gravel accordingly.

We wanted to lay them as tight as possible for weed control.  I also wanted to get them tight against the mowing strip on the right and the garden bed on the left. A curved edge gives a nice radius for Mr. Midwood to run the mower right over the edge to eliminate the need for weed whacking.  I also chose a mix of stone colors and tried to distribute them somewhat evenly.  Each stone is different with a lot of natural clefting that has to be considered for safe footing.

After a bit of tweaking and rearranging, I found  a nice layout for the stone pathway.  We still needed to adjust the gravel for the different stone thicknesses and dig out the the edge a bit  to accommodate the irregular stone shapes.  I tried to lay them the same way on the lawn to keep the pattern together.  Thankfully, I took a picture, which helped so much when I was ready to lay them in the final time.

More gravel…

…and close scrutiny.

Finally, Mr. Midwood built up the wall around the garden with some of the smaller stones that we had to take out of the path. The above shot is from the next morning.  It looks sooo much better and is a lot more functional now.

By the way, if you are looking for and awesome workout, build yourself a stone pathway or patio.  Full. body. workout.