Transform Your Landscape with DIY Garden Steps
If you have a sloping lawn, garden steps could be a great way to tidy up the look of your garden and offer an all-weather alternative to walking down the grass and getting your shoes muddy. You can use a huge range of materials and while the excavation for the steps can be time consuming, it’s actually a relatively simple project. It’s the perfect way to join up your landscape, especially if you have a shed or garage at the end of the garden you’d like to access regularly.
The deeper your steps, the fewer you need to build so it’s always worth considering that when you’re planning your garden steps. If you’re using a material like paving slabs or railway sleepers, the depth of each step could be determined by the length of the material – that means you also save time on cutting each step to size.
Remember to begin your garden steps with a concrete slab for stability, and stack the end of the last step onto the inner lip of the next one (rather than letting it rest on soil) so that your steps are level and structurally sound. There will be a lot of digging involved so that you can put each step into the ground and make it level!
Railway Sleeper Garden Steps
Using railway sleepers for your garden steps means you have an interesting material for the edging, don’t need to shape or cut other timber, and you know that they’ll be stable. You can choose between using railway sleepers for the entire step (lining them up width-ways so that the length of the step is made with sleepers), or you can just use the sleepers for an outside ‘box’ and then fill the main part of your step with concrete, soil, or even gravel.
If you’re opting for a sleeper frame, you can fix the railway sleepers together with metal brackets to keep them still and then fill the inside with your material of choice. This means that you don’t have to relocate the soil you dig up for the steps and can put it straight back into the centre before adding your concrete or gravel.
If you’re pouring concrete, remember to cover the sleepers with plastic sheeting so that you don’t accidentally drip the mixture onto your wood.
Building your garden steps yourself can save hundreds, if not thousands, in contractor fees. All of the materials can be bought from your local Lawsons branch, so in a few weekends’ time you could have your own beautiful garden steps.
