Side yard path: a 12 × 40 ft yard plan

12 × 40 ft. A narrow strip beside the house turned into a gravel path with a bed and a gate at each end.

Open this plan in the planner It opens as your own copy, beside anything you already have drawn.

Side yard path, drawn to scale: 12 × 40 ft. A narrow strip beside the house turned into a gravel path with a bed and a gate at each end.
12 × 40 ft, 480 sq ft. Drawn in the planner and exported as it is.

The strip down the side of a house is usually the yard's forgotten corner: too narrow to use, too shaded for a lawn, and the route the bins take. This plan makes it a path. A four-foot run of decomposed granite between paver edging carries the bins and the wheelbarrow, and the ground on either side becomes a mulched bed of shade-tolerant shrubs, with a gate at each end.

It is the cheapest plan here and the one with the best return per foot, because a lawn that was never going to grow there stops being mowed. A drip line down the bed waters it without a sprinkler throwing water at the house wall.

What is in it

Material How much Ballpark cost
Decomposed Granite 140 sq ft · 1.3 cu yd $58 – $123
Mulch 268 sq ft · 2.5 cu yd $74 – $161
Paver Edging 80 linear ft $640 – $1,440
Shrub 6 $150 – $540
Drip Line 72 linear ft $144 – $360
Fence 40 linear ft $800 – $2,400
Gate 2 $400 – $2,400
Path Light 3 $120 – $450
Materials in total $2,387 – $7,874

National ranges for materials only, before labour and delivery. The planner quotes the same list for your state, and every quantity here changes as soon as you move something.

Guides for this plan

Open this plan in the planner All example plans