Quick Guide to Making a Gravel Pathway

A gravel pathway can be a beautiful addition to a home. It can become a stunning entrance to your house or a path leading to your lovely garden. With self-binding gravel, you can even avoid the pitfalls that come with a loose gravel pathway.

If you’re one of the many who want to install one in your home, follow this quick guide. Take note of these steps and you’ll soon have a beautiful gravel pathway for your home.

1. Lay out the path

Determine the path you want to follow for either your front or backyard. You can mark this with a garden hose, rope or spray paint. Using this as a guide, dig soil out until the path is up to 100 mm deep. Make a trench on both sides of the path and ensure you keep them straight and at the exact height by regularly taking measurements as you go. Dump the soil onto a tarp for easy cleaning up. The concept of the method is demonstrated in this video

When the entire path has been excavated, smoothen it out with a rake. Depending on how much foot traffic you expect, a layer of 60 mm of crushed stone from a landscaping yard should be applied and compacted. Professionally, this is done using a plate compactor, however for light pathway use, compaction can often be done with good old fashioned elbow grease. Hosing and manually pounding a solid base for small areas is possible by use of a heavy flat object, such as a besser brick.

2. Set up the border

There are different materials that you can use for the border. You can choose from aluminium, steel, timber, block or paver edging. Steel is a popular choice as it can easily be curved to fit the shape of your path and it also offers a clean look. Australian products LinkEdge and Formboss can be found at major retailers.

Whichever material you choose though, make a template bar or spreader bar that you’ll use to hold the edging equally parallel materials at an even distance all throughout the entire path. Once the correct spacing is established, set the border by hammering it in place using a wooden hammer or a rubber mallet.

3. Fill it up with gravel

Fill the path with your gravel then rake it out to ensure that it is even all throughout the entire path. Ensure that you follow the correct depth depending on the size of your stone. Take note of these measurements:

• 6mm single sized stone – 30mm depth
• 10mm single sized stone – 40mm depth
• 20mm single sized stone – 60mm depth

Allow for the gravel to settle before proceeding to step 4.

4. Pour the gravel binder

To stabilise your loose gravel you will need to bind them together. The best solution for this is Pour On. You can easily install this on your gravel pathway by pouring the resin over the path. You can read our installation guide for detailed instructions on how to use the product. Getting your gravel pathway resin-bound will ensure that you don’t occasionally have a few stones go over the pathway and into your garden, or worse get stuck in your shoes and into your house. This also means not having to regularly fill your pathway with gravel.

A gravel pathway may be just a simple addition to your home, but it makes a huge difference to how your home looks. Just follow the four steps above to get that beautiful pathway that’s missing in your property.

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