DIY Stone Path

We wanted to make our front yard a little less wasteland-ish and more welcoming, but have little to no extra money for little things like that to make us happy. :( After a bit of Pinterest-surfing we decided to make a path from the driveway to the front door. We always cut across the grass there anyway and our grass is atrocious...less grass is good.

We took an afternoon and dug up an old stone pathway on the side of our house that we never used. The rocks just got in the way of the gate and most of them were almost completely covered up with soil and debris... ugly. We just used a shovel and lifted them out one by one, bringing them to the front yard. These rocks turned out to be a blessing because when they're cleaned up, are attractive and... they're free. :) We took a look at how many we had in order to figure out how long the path should be and where it should lay. The final decision was pretty easy. We wanted it to line up with where we park the car often and we wanted it to lead one to the front door.

The hardest part is putting all of the pieces together to make an attractive path. After trying to work together on this (and failing) I gave up and let my husband figure it out. I'm glad I did, because he did a superb job. I love it! This is the design he made:

Stone Path covered in Texas snow. 

We just left it as is for several months- no time, no money, no babysitter (cannot leave our pre-schooler and toddler alone for five minutes!) The grass and weeds grew up in between the stones and started to cover them. Ugh. Finally, my husband was able to get a trailer-load of crushed granite. He picked all of the stones up, cut out the sod, leveled the dirt and laid down weed cloth. Then, he began shoveling the granite onto the path. When it was time to put the stones back, this is where it got tricky. He took pictures ahead of time and laid the stones aside strategically but those rocks just all looked the same and we could not recreate the first design. After much aggravation, he finally made a new design. The crushed granite improves the look, don't ya think? That trailer-load only cost about $35. We are not finished filling it in yet because we are trying to figure out what to edge the path with. We have a bunch of bricks that were free and leftover from a project. I say free is great and the bricks will do, but my husband wants to try out other options.

Stone Path with crushed granite.

I'm glad he wasn't satisfied with the bricks because the perfect stones to line the path were hidden in the tall, grass around an overgrown flower bed in the back yard all along. We don't quite have enough to line the whole path but it really makes the whole thing look nice. Nobody in our neighborhood has a path similar to rhis. Either we're on the cutting edge or in a time warp. But who cares? We like it, use it everyday, and it makes our yard look like prettier.

There's a pesky cat in the 'hood who likes to use our front yard as a litter box. When you stepped outside, the smell of cat urine assaulted the nose! I decided to clean out the flower beds and put the crushed granite in place of the mulch. There was an overgrown and diseased rosebush in this bed and it had to go. (Very sad that it became diseased because when we first moved in, it was full and had lovely blooms.) I got a shovel and some trimmers and got to work. I raked out the debris and filled the bed with the granite. We used a dolly to move a big planter filled with zinnias, cockscomb and coleus from the backyard to the front and set it right on top of the granite. My husband is a science dude and loves to collect rocks and fossils. He had a bunch of these white stones scattered about so I piled them all up and placed a wrought-iron Texas in the middle. We never could find the right spot for the Texas thing but now I think this will be it's home for a while. The granite doesn't float away with rain. It stays put and looks great. Wish I had a "before" picture...

Flower bed filled with crushed granite, potted plants,
pile of stones and a Texas symbol.