Farm-stand Parking Lot and Landscape

 Watch this week's video here.

This week the project I am showing is how I did the landscaping around the Farm-stand that we have been filling with produce all summer.

I know that not many of you are going to be making a parking lot but the same technique can be used for walkways and such around your dollhouse.

I also touch a bit on how I make grass for lawns in the video. It is not the main focus but you will see how I do that process. I will be doing the grass technique in the future when I landscape my large dollhouse.

The graveling process was time consuming but it is also a fairly large area too. It took me a week to do, working on it some everyday. I did need to spend a lot of time waiting for glue to dry so that was part of the time. Also I needed to buy more glue twice! I really underestimated the amount of glue this would take. I used 4 ½ bottles (5 oz size) of my cheap glue. I chose to use the cheap glue because I knew it was much thinner and would spread out thinner on the board. Also I knew it would take a lot of glue and didn't want to waste the good glue on this project. This is one of those projects where the cheap glue is going to do what you want and the better (thicker) glues really would not do as well. It would have taken a lot more tacky glue to cover the surface because it is so much thicker, so that would have gotten pretty expensive.

The total spent on materials for the gravel area is well under $10. Lets see, 5 bottles of glue at $.99 each ($ 4.95) bag of cat litter $.99 so a total of $5.96 not bad at all. It would have been more had I needed to go buy paint for under but I already had the paint left over from a floor painting project we did a few years ago. If I would have had to buy paint it would have been around $3 or $4 so we would still be under $10 for this.

Now the biggest thing I learned in this process is that it is much messier than I had anticipated. I should have put down a drop cloth of some kind on the floor to make clean up easier. Or better yet done this outside (but you need the weather to cooperate for that to work. So next time a drop cloth is definitely on the list. I think one of those party table cloths from the dollar store would have worked just fine.

Now that the base is done I only have one more type of produce I am going to add to this. So next week I will show you that.

I do have at least one or two plants I want to do for the green house but I need to figure out how to do them so they will show up later on.

I need to do a few little things like finish making the sign for the store and a few little things then I will do a video tour of the Farm-stand for you.

Then we are on to other projects. I have a lot of fun things planned but be sure to request what you want to see too.

Now lets get a closer look at some of the pictures I took while doing this project.

 

So first a couple of shots of the finished product so you can see where I was going with this. I love how the grass and gravel turned out. It is even better in person too.

Here is the gravel as we started it out, just glued down to the gray board. It already looks like a gravel parking lot.

After the glue water mixture (when I looked online I found that people use anywhere from 1 part glue/ 10 parts water to equal parts glue and water, the constant was the drop or two of dish washing soap)