DIY Gravel Walkway Tutorial

3 Materials
$100
1 Day
Medium

This DIY gravel walkway is a great way to create an easy, pretty, and useful walkway around your front porch and yard. Gravel walkways complement all types of houses and decor from older cottages to modern ranch houses. Not only is it easy to do, but it's also relatively inexpensive, and can be adapted to include stones or pavers, if you want.

Whether you are handy or not, this walkway can be modified easily to fit your own requirements by using different edging, rocks or adding stepping stones or pavers. This is a fairly straight-forward project.

All you need is a willingness to get dirty and some basic materials that we outline on our website.

Calculate your materials based on: 4-inches of crushed stone, 1-inch of sand and your gravel. Use our handy method to determine the amount you need here: http://www.front-porch-ideas-and-more.com/diy-walkway-idea.html

Then lay out your walkway using a garden hose, pvc pipe, string, or other materials to define the edges of your walkway - remember to allow additional width for edging and working the path. Now you can start digging! We first removed the sod and used some of it to patch other places in our yard. Keep digging to remove the dirt to a depth of about 4 inches.

After the dirt was removed install your edging material. We used reclaimed brick from a construction site to use as the border (tip: if you have a new sub-division being built in your community, contact the builder to see if you can use the discarded brick).

When the edging is done, spread the crushed gravel layer. We rented a plate compactor and used it over the entire walkway to compact the crushed stone. This will give a really solid base upon which to place sand (if applicable) and your surface material.

Note: Placing an inch or so of sand on top of the crushed stone allows you to level the walkway before you place your surface material. In our case, we were using pea gravel as a top coat and so we did not need to use sand.

After that, we spread the pea gravel and filled in the sod back to the edging with grass seed. (Tip: Instead of having pea gravel delivered we purchased what we needed at a home store by the bag. And we also learned a trick about how much pea gravel to use on top so that you don't feel like you are walking in sand. Visit our website for more details about that!)

We just love not only the cottage-look the walkway gives our house with the new porch landscaping, it's also a perfect way to connect all the areas of our yard, especially when it's wet!

You can see more details and info about this walkway and the landscaping at the url below:

Seven years later! We still love our walkway. Over the seven years we've made a few updates. Last year, we widened our walkway and added stepping stones. The primary reason we widened it is because our garden was getting bigger than we wished, so we pushed it back, allowing for a wider walkway.


We also added some brick along the garden's edge. The bricks give it a nice, finished look although it was fine without them. We still love our cottage-style walkway and maintenance is fairly minimal. If you enjoy a relaxed style, then this kind of walkway may be for you.


Thank you SO MUCH for all your kind words, questions and thoughts. Who knew a walkway would evoke such emotion! This post has had over a million views and thank you.

We created our walkway a number of years ago and here is a video describing how we did it. The walkway goes around the front of our porch, and all the way to the back of our home. We have really enjoyed having it and it has undergone a few changes over the years. Thank you for watching.

Resources for this project:
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  • Lana Craddock Lana Craddock on Jun 01, 2021

    We did this last year based on your tutorial. A walkway all around my flower gardens. Came out great. A year later, still no weeds. We were thinking about putting dry cement on the top of the gravel and wetting it down to "set" it. Would this be a bad idea?

  • Jane Jane on Jun 05, 2022

    How do you keep the bark separated from the gravel?

  • Michelle Michelle on Jun 11, 2022

    It looks really nice, but how do you keep the mulch from getting into the gravel? That would be a lot of work to keep separating the 2 and I don't see a border between that? Very pretty though.

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