6 DIY Walkway Ideas to DIY Before Summer Begins

If you are looking for creative DIY walkway ideas to do yourself before the summer, you are in the right place! Here are the 6 diy walkway ideas to DIY before summer begins.

While your backyard or front yard can be spruced up with a garden bed or flower bed, it’s also a great idea to find some walkway material and create a beautiful garden pathway for your home. Luckily, there’s tons of ways to create a DIY garden pathway or stone pathway for your yard.

You want your walkway to be well designed and finished meticulously in readiness for receiving and welcoming guests in your home since summer is a good time to welcome visitors as long as the sunshine lasts.

But how do you create the best walkway? You borrow ideas from the experts! Here are our seven most favorite walkway ideas you can do yourself in your next walkway landscaping project.

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1. Stamped Concrete Walkways

Concrete walkways add a rustic or weathered rock appeal to your garden path and remain subtle, with their minimalist color blending well with the green scenery along the trail.

They are among the most common cheap walkway ideas people opt to use to keep the costs of the path to a minimum.

If you don’t like the rustic appeal of concrete, you can try texturing or coloring it to reduce the dullness, especially when it flows through a backyard or garden with exposed soil or old trees.

A stamped concrete is worth trying if you are on a tight budget or just want to keep things simple and humble. Stamping makes the concrete more appealing and eliminates the dreaded haggard look of merely poured concrete.

2. Brick Walkway

A brick walkway offers more versatility than a concrete walkway such that you can arrange the bricks in many different patterns or a combination of several of them as per your preferences.

The most common patterns include herringbone and running bond. However, the former is less beginner-friendly, so you might want to stay clear of it and try a bond pattern.

They are a simple DIY project to start and finish in a few hours if you have the right tools, materials, and basic masonry skills.

To make a brick walkway, you will need to clear the ground, add a layer of gravel, lay landscape fabric, install edging material, and add a thin layer of sand before laying the bricks.

The landscape fabric helps keep weeds from the garden path by stifling them and locking out the oxygen necessary for their growth.

There are many design options for a brick walkway, but straight ones are the most commonly preferred because of their ease of maintenance. You can also choose to use differently-colored bricks for an array of colors and unique pomp against the green scenery.

3. Pallet Wood Walkway

While there are many wood-based walkway ideas to explore, such as wood chips, wood slices, and wood mulching, pallet wood walkways offer a better alternative for short garden paths.

They are one of the most affordable landscaping projects to try since pallets are usually readily available for purchase from companies or free from friends and dumps.

To make the best pallet walkway, consider placing them on lava rocks or sizable wood planks to ensure they are not destroyed by soil moisture. You can also treat them with termiticides to keep off ants and termites.

The rustic appeal of recycled pallet wood is a sight to enjoy, but you may also paint them a single color or a variety of colors to add some pomp and vibrancy.

4. Gravel Walkway

There are hundreds of gravel walkway ideas and designs to try for the perfect landscape appeal before the summer.

The good thing with a gravel path is that the cost of making one is low because gravel is cheap. Furthermore, the trick here is to keep it as narrow as possible, especially if it’s a long one that meanders up and about the garden.

Keeping a path with gravel narrow also ensures very little to no chippings are exposed out of it into other important parts of the landscape like the flowerbeds.

It’s easy to build a budget-friendly gravel path because you only need a thin layer of gravel, and the edging is optional depending on the design you use.

If the path is the same level as the ground or lower, you don’t have to use any edging. However, a plastic edging is ideal for a narrow, raised gravel path to ensure the chippings do not spill out into the surrounding ground.

5. Paver Walkway

A paver walkway is an excellent alternative to a brick one if you have a friendly wallet. Pavers come in many different sizes, colors, and shapes, allowing you to try out different design options as per your liking.

The versatility of pavers makes them a better choice if you want to add a touch of formality and modernity down in your home.

Although expensive to buy and install at first, paver walkways require very little maintenance if done the right way. They are thus less costly in the long run than other common options.

6. Stepping Stone Walkway

Stepping-stone paths are best done as a weekend project because their process is lengthy and time-consuming. They involve a lot of dirty work as you have to dig out sod or portions of topsoil in alternating sections of the path to create spaces that the stones will occupy.

Despite all the dirt work, a stone-paved path is one of the simplest and cheapest DIY projects to try. Stones are easy to find and inexpensive to buy from landscape suppliers.

Additionally, they do not require any special expertise to line up a path, which means you can handle the work without enlisting the help of a landscape contractor.

You may choose between ordinary and color stones for your path, though the latter are rare and less common. If you want to add some vibrancy or pomp, there are myriad colors to choose from and apply on your own on the stones.

The one key thing to note about stepping-stone walkways is that they are good for promoting the growth of ground cover plants between the alternating stones, which adds a dash of green beauty along the path.

However, the plants can be a disadvantage because it’s hard to cut the grass or cover plants, and in a poorly drained area, the result would be a soggy path.

Trust your instincts. Who wants to walk down a soggy or dewy path?  Talk of choosing between cheap and soggy or cheap and lush green!

Bottom Line

When it comes to changing our location from one point to another, we have no choice but to choose a path in life that will offer comfort and take us where we want to go without having to struggle helplessly through it.

And when that path is your home’s walkway, you want it to be as inviting, comfortable, and efficient as is practically possible.

While you can opt to go for cheap walkway ideas like stepping-stone paths and gravel walkways, you can alternatively choose the road less traveled by and go for the more expensive, stylish, and modern options of pavers or brick walkways.

Which one will you travel by?