Last week, I showed you the new concrete porch in the front of the house. Today, let us go to the backyard for another concrete project – the new trailer parking pad!
This area is located on the south side of our garage. When we moved in back in 2017, this area was part of the front yard lawn:
In 2018, we constructing a new fence here and enclosed this area behind. Since then, this side yard has been used to park our utility trailer.
Although very functional, parking the trailer here slowly killed the lawn grass beneath, and the dogs started use it as a sandbox to nap in.
The soil surrounding the trailer also became more compact. Instead of healthy lawn grass, weeds started to grow.
We had talked about pouring a proper parking pad for a couple years. This July, when we hired a concrete contractor to build the new front porch, we added this area into the concrete work, filling the space between the gravel area under the fence line and the existing sidewalk.
Before the contractors came, Slav and I removed the pea gravel and pulled up the landscape edging around the work area. These pea gravels would be put back eventually. But for then, we wanted to give the contractor some space to build the form.
On the day of concrete work, the contractors started by removing a few inches of soil from the space. Then they built the form and compacted down the soil.
A metal wire mesh was added to prevent the new concrete pad from cracking and separating. The new pad would fill the entire length from the drive gate to the end of the sidewalk.
The same contractor also worked on the garage floor for my neighbor across the street on the same day. Sharing the labor and the concrete truck significantly lowered the cost for both of us. But the parking situation on our street that day was kinda crazy.
The pups were locked in the house for good measure – we do not want hundreds of paw prints all over the new concrete patio!
By mid-afternoon, the new parking pad was poured and finished. It was amazing how a team of people worked so seamlessly that they created this in only 6 hours.
The edge of the pad is about 8″ away from the fence line. This space would be filled with pea gravel again after the concrete pad was properly cured.
We were told to stay off the new pad for 5 days. A temporary fencing was set up to block the dogs out. Although every single of them could easily clear the low fencing, lucky for us, none of them attempted.
After five days, we removed the temporary fencing, put the pea gravel back, and parked the trailer onto the new pad.
As you can see, the new parking pad was a lot longer than the trailer itself. This is intentional for easier access from the back of the trailer.
Here is Dazumble, checking out the new parking spot!
Here is a closer look of the pea gravel area along the fence. The height of the new pad is tall enough to hold back the pea gravel, so we no longer need to use landscape edging here.
Beyond the parking pad area, we put in landscape edging to better contain the small-size pea gravel, then aligned it with decorative concrete blocks that match other area of the backyard.
As you can imagine, the pups are happy to get their yard back!
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