All the menfolk in my house share a deep and abiding obsession with golf. Like, as an infant, the Kiddo would happily flip through my husband's golf magazines for long, quiet stretches. The Mr. has an official handicap. My dad has probably read every word Mr. Pelz has ever published. It's pretty serious around here.
So when my big mouth, once again, just couldn't contain a big crazy idea, needless to say they were all on board.
Backyard Putting Green. Yeassssss.
We started with a jungle of patchy grass, where the shady soil never fully dries out.
Then, using a flat (square headed) shovel, we took just the very top layer off. Because our soil has thick clay so close to the surface, the plant roots are all shallow, and get taken off in this step.
After a lot of sweat, we were left with some fairly level dirt.
But it's always good to double check. Plus, we wanted to make sure we still had a good drainage slope, away from the house.
Then, we packed down our soil base.
Next, we put down the first base layer for the green.
Then, we rented a plate compactor from our local Home Depot, to save our arms and make sure the compaction was a little better than the hand tamper we'd been using.
Nice and smooth.
Then, it rained for so long, I thought our next project would need to be an ark. So we tarped over all our hard work and waited for sunnier skies.
While it rained and rained and rained, we did a little indoor work cutting the PVC for the holes.
Compound miter saws make these cuts much easier.
We set some caps in to make a clean base for the cups.
I left just a little bit of room around the PVC.
Then, we set them in concrete, post-hole style. Adding dry concrete mix in the gap...
Then, we had to turn our attention to the fancy artificial turf we special ordered. This is a lot nicer (and pricier) than the stuff on the back wall with the carpet at the home supply store, so we really wanted to make sure we measured 5 times, cut once.
As with all carpets, this one was way easier to cut from the back. A white crayon came in very handy in marking our cut lines.
Once we were happy with the placement, it was time to break out the glue. And read the directions carefully.
We laid down some of the plastic scraps to keep our to-be-glued surfaces clean while we fitted them. Then, ran 4 beads of glue down the seam tape, like our instructions told us.
Once the seams were nice and tight, we hammered in some seam pins to keep it from wiggling while the glue set long enough to be rolled. We kept these in for about a day to give the glue plenty of time to cure, then removed them.
After the seams were rolled, I made the final edge cuts with a utility knife.
We put some of the seam pins in to mark the hole locations. And played the worst game of horseshoes ever.
Then, cut an X over the hole, and trimmed the excess away.
Finally, we had to decide how to edge the green. With the gray stone of the patio, we found the closest shade of small rock at Lowes.