If you have followed me on Instagram for the last year, do you remember “The Great Walkway Project” from this spring? The one my Grand and I spent two months digging up and gathering rocks for not only this project, but also for the flower beds at the new shop?

Well, I’m finally going to share a little bit about it. This project took some elbow grease and was WORK but it was SO rewarding and I absolutely love the end result. It also cost me zero dollars to create such a cute, cottage style walking path to my shop. We all love “free” in this economy, amiright? Granted, the rocks were readily available all over the ranch, we just had to pick them.

Here’s just a glimpse at how many rocks there are. I think my great-grandkids could pick rocks and there would still be a million left. I love that we gathered a piece of the place and used the resources we had to repurpose for our project and make something really beautiful out of it.

Of course, the dogs accompanied us on most of our gator ride journeys to pick rocks. Huck always. He enjoyed finding some treasures of his own.

I couldn’t have accomplished this so quickly without my Grand. She put her blood, sweat, and (not sure if there were any-maybe from laughing with me) tears into this idea of mine and I’m so grateful for her help and the time I got to spend with her doing it. Between the two of us, we come up with some pretty great ideas, if you ask me. Ha! We also realized just how much we like rocks. Now when we see one, we will giggle and say, “that’s a nice rock, I bet that would look good for _____.”

Anyways, back to this project. From the gate of my fence entry to the porch of my little shop, it’s just a few short strides. However, it slopes downward a bit. When it rains, it’s a mess and I figured after a while, there’d be a beat down path anyhow-might as well make it a permanent, cute one. Since a fancy schmancy walkway wasn’t in the budget, I had the idea of doing a few big slabs of rock to the entrance. Literal stepping stones, if you will. So we laid the large ones you see in the middle first. Our plan was to leave it at that but then we felt like it needed more. It actually worked out either way because I reccommend laying your large, middle steps first and then going out on each side as a guide to building the flow of it.

That led us to deciding we wanted a whole path that looked like a mini river to the porch with one large rock as our step up.

Finally, we laid all of the rocks out that we liked to start our pattern, placed them how we wanted them and started digging. This tool is what I absolutely recommend when you are digging. The cobra head makes it easy to pull up the grass. We would trace around each rock, making an outline and then set the rock aside and dig the depth needed for the rock to set in with just a slight amount of the rock peeking out to step on. Then, repeat for all. It takes a while and your arms might feel like they will fall off but you get a great workout from it and a sense of accomplishment when it’s all said and done.

I will say, once you start making headway down your path, you’ll notice you might have to adjust and add to. We picked several extra rocks of different shapes and sizes to fill in those gaps. I purposefully didn’t have any rocks touching because I intended to have some grass grow between them all to give that garden/cottage walkway feel. Before we got to the porch, we went ahead and set the two big rocks we used as a step. We didn’t really dig them out, only enough to have them level. That gave us an idea on how many it would take to connect the remainder of the walkway and if we needed to adjust the placement of any of the rocks.

This was when the grass finally started growing. I plan to share a whole post on the outside of the shop with everything completed very soon! Until then, here’s a sneak peek.

I know not everyone has rocks available but if you do or know someone that does who just wants them out of the way, this is a project that you can do to save money and also upgrade the look of your business, home, garden, etc for FREE. I am so happy with it and can’t wait to finish out my raised flower bed area as I’m doing the same thing over there.

Happy landscaping!