A New Sidewalk

When I moved into my house, I built a quick and inexpensive pea gravel walkway to link the house and garage.  After five years of use and effects of gravity with the slope of my yard, it was time for a change.  The pea gravel continually shifted down the hill and had to be raked back into place every couple of weeks.

After much discussion and debate we decided to go with a boardwalk to avoid lots of grade work and to keep costs down.  We found a multi-hued hardwood floor on Pinterest that served as an inspiration for our final product.  We decided to floor the boardwalk with a combination of 2x4, 2x6, and 2x8 boards stained with three different colors.

Step one was to cut all the floorboards to their final width of 36" then stain all the floorboards and boards that would become the substructure.

After everything was stained, we used recycled bricks and newly purchased capblock to serve as a foundation for the sidewalk.

Next, we put in the substructure.  We used 2x4's for the upper side and middle and 4x4's for the lower side.

Next came the floor boards and some 1x4 trim to finish the edges.

We used a repeating pattern every nine boards to ensure that we used all the boards and didn't have matching boards side by side.  Next steps include building steps off the boardwalk into the back yard, plantings along both sides and a new fence between the boardwalk and back yard.