Original installation 3/2023
When I had this idea, I wasn’t sure if it was brilliant or terrible. This boardwalk had a lot going in its favor. Things I considered:
Positives:
I don’t chew up the wood of the new stairs and flooring in the house by tracking cinder.
It’s elevated so the walkway stays dry even when it rains for three weeks straight.
It fills my need for fun and colorful yard décor.
It used up ‘trash’ lumber- some pallets, some scrap from the lanai & stairs rebuild, some lumber I found around the perimeter of the house when I started cleaning- thus it was free *and* reduced waste going to the transfer station.
Negatives and Neutrals:
It’s (some untreated) wood, touching the ground, in a high rainfall area, which means it’ll likely have a short lifespan and need regular/semi-annual replacement of boards to maintain. Counter argument: pallets/replacement boards are free/salvage.
It attracts slugs and snails. Counter argument: collecting snails from the walkway is far preferred from collecting them around my veggies.
Fault learned during the build: The feral piggies like to flip the boards to forage for grubs. Solution: I screwed all the boards together making the slab too big for them to flip. The only real permanent solution for this is to fence out the piggies, which is a whole other project and not a failure on the boardwalks’ part.
How I did it:
Collect lumber. I did a crude calculation of how many boards I’d need based on the length of the walkway, 22 feet/264 inches divided by 4 inches (the nominal width of a 2×4) which is 66 boards. The length of the boards was irrelevant, I kept anything over a foot long when building my initial stockpile. I would use the longer boards first, but could use shorter pieces (between longer ones for stability) if I needed to. I wanted a varied edge for the house side of the walkway and knew I could fill in for aesthetics with the really short pieces. Because I had a few wider (2×6 & 2×8 boards), I started placing boards when I had about 50. I didn’t want to have extra as part of this project was to use up scraps, not make more! I now know to wait til I have all I need plus a couple for error so I can mix my colors and widths better (and not have to leave a project incomplete for two weeks while I find and clean a few more boards)
Starting at the stair end (because it was even, versus the driveway end where I meet up with an uneven asphalt edge), I alternated between painted and plain boards, keeping the outside edge even more or less straight down from the stairs as I went. Many of the boards had nails on one wide side and I left them as anchors to keep the pieces from moving over the days it took me to place everything.
After the second night the pigs flipped a bunch of the boards, I knew I’d need to anchor or tie them all together somehow and decided to put an edging on the outside. Plan was I could screw the edging into each board to make it act like one solid piece. A few boards were rotten on both ends and required cutting to give me a solid, straight end on the outside to drill in to. Some I could put the bad end toward the flowerbed so I left it- I knew these would rot in place eventually, so why do unnecessary trimming? This trimming resulted in a loss of a couple boards- there was no trimming off the bad wood. It was a risk I took using salvage wood. Now I needed even more boards to finish the walkway.
I ended up needing a couple small pieces to finish the walkway along the unevenness of the asphalt, but a little back and forth wedging and a few hammer taps of some cut-to-length pieces made the boardwalk nice and tight.
I used some 1×2 trim pieces removed from the old bathroom as the straight outside edge. It worked as planned, I could tell when the pigs rooted around the boardwalk but they never succeeded in flipping it again.
When it comes time to replace a board, I need only find a replacement of the approximate size, unscrew the screws (if they still exist. Rust is REAL here) for the edging board, swap boards, and add new screws.
Questions you might have:
Did I level the area before laying the boards? Not at all. It was mostly level already, having been the primary walkway into the house before we added another stairway on the front. Did that mean I ended up with a few unlevel boards? Yes, yes it did. A few scoops of cinder and well placed rocks to hold the gravel in fixed that.
3/2024 How’s it look a year later? Good! I really expected to need to replace boards by now and it is still holding up! I had planned to put flowers in along the house and have since discovered the roof overhand keeps this area really dry. There are a few coleus there now but they are unhappy (except the one growing *IN* in walkway and the one at the corner who gets water from the driveway.) . I’m going to replant them and use the area to collect stones instead.