5-Things Wednesday: Rocks, Dirt, and More Rocks

This project was on my to-do list for a long time. I have this 2ft wide path with pebbles next to the walkway between the garage and the entrance door. Over the last 6 years, it was getting more and more difficult to keep it orderly because there was no weed barrier underneath. The only way to pull the weeds out with the root was to use a little shovel to get under the pebbles. Every time I did that, more dirt was coming to the surface, and more rocks were getting buried into the dirt. At the end of last year, with other things on my mind, I completely gave up on removing the weeds from the path, and it was not pretty. I don't have close up pictures of how bad it looked, for obvious reasons, and this one was from last spring. The pebbles are to the right of the concrete path in front of the door.

The guys from Green 'n Growing, who planted the tree in the front, suggested it would cost about $200 to get new rocks in there. I didn't like that idea, of paying for something I thought I could do myself, so I finally started this project without much before-thought. 

Here is the project in five steps:

1. Just start it! I didn't really have a plan, and it was delaying this project from happening. I imagined it would not be a one-day endeavor, but I was confident I can fix it. I knew I wanted to save the rocks that were there, not have to buy new ones, which meant all the buried rocks have to come out. How exactly - I didn't know. So, one day I just started scooping pebbles from one corner.

2. After few scoops, I realized it's going to take quite some time. Even the surface rocks were mixed with a lot of dry leaves, mulch that was washed off from the flower bed, and weeds. I soon had to pick each pebble individually. One. By. One. Yeah, that first day, after couple of hours, I removed only about foot length of rocks. 

The surface rocks were fairly clean, but I still had to rinse them in the yard clippings buckets that had holes on the bottom. All the clean rocks I stored in an old recycling bucket, and it turned out that was just about how many rocks I had. 

3. Once I removed the surface rocks, I used a small rake to dig the pebbles from the dirt. This was a looong process! The ground was soft enough after recent rains, but that also meant the rocks were covered in muddy dirt. So, those needed extra rinsing. At first I thought it would make sense if they're rinsed over the rocks that have not been picked up yet, instead of throwing that washed off dirt and small pebbles that fall through the holes, elsewhere. But that only made the mud worse.  Those other rocks were much harder to dig out from the extra layer of mud.

I didn't take pictures during the process of taking the rocks out, but it was a mess. A Mess. It took me and mom, who helped immensely, about a month to pick out and clean all the rocks. I would dig them out over the weekend or some evenings, and then she would rinse and rinse them during the week. We tried different methods; several buckets, oven grease pen with holes, and finally me rinsing batches of pebbles in a pan. 

What a site for our eyes when all the pebbles were removed, and I finally rinsed the last one! Just looking at this dry, rock-free area brings peace after weeks of muddy mess.

4. The next two steps were a breeze. I first got some extra dirt to raise the ground level so to rocks would be closer to the concrete level. Since all the rocks I dug out filled up the recycling bucket, plus just a little bit extra, I calculated the volume of the bucket and the volume of the area where the rocks need to go. Based on that, I figured out how deep the area needs to be to house the amount of rocks I had. I know, I am the geeky engineer. :) Then I cut the weed barrier underlayment, and placed two layers.

5. And finally, the clean rocks went back in. The completed project: