Posted about this in thread about my septic question, some people were interested in what I was doing so figured I'd make a quick post on it. The house came with a really nice Gorilla branded kids playset, these things are like $6-10K from what I've seen online, so it would be a shame to not use it, but the area around it was all grass, weeds, roots, etc, so it wasn't really conducive to letting the kids play. There was also an area behind it that was sort of dead space between the tree line with the neighboring property and the playset.
So, I decided to box it in, level it out and fill the whole area with pea gravel. This will hopefully be a much cleaner, safer, more inviting kids play area, plus the area behind it will be used for a nice big shed - which means I can clear all the lawn equipment, garden stuff and kids ride-on toys out of the garage and get back to having a 'car stuff only' setup.
The area is 25'x45', so 1000sqft. Ordered some 3" high rubber curbing from Wal-Mart of all places, levelled it out and put it down...Cost about $300, but that was only about $50 more than using pressure treat and rebar (cost of rebar is insane), well worth it IMO and so much easier to handle. Then I scraped all the grass and weeds out, and did my best to level the base a bit, without disturbing some massive roots (fear of killing trees that I want alive)....The process sucked! Today, I put down some landscape fabric so we're all ready for the gravel.
I estimated we will need 10 tons of gravel, and as noted in the septic thread, it's going to have to get transfered from the driveway due to a septic field that needs to be crossed....So that's the next step. Depending on how the weather is looking, I am hoping to have it delivered later this week so I can bang through it next weekend.
Here's the progress so far, really looking forward to having the shed up so I can clean up and declutter the garage and some other spots in the yard.
