Pea Gravel Dog Kennel Fix

I let this go for way too long, but this July I finally got around to making our little dog area look decent. I also wanted to get on top of this before another rainy/snowy season when the ground becomes all muddy. Wet and muddy dog prints – not so cute across my kitchen.

The best fix I came up with was to make a pea gravel bottom instead of dirt, and I used landscape cloth to help deter future weed growth. To help hold gravel in place on the “human used” side of our gravel patio, I’d used some very handy ground cover paver forms (see picture at the very bottom), but I didn’t want to spend that much on the dog side. Long story less long, I should have spent the extra $$ and bought more of the heavy-duty paver forms, but I’d decided to try a less expensive option. You could use the less expensive forms like I did, because at the end I figured out a way to make them work almost as well. But honestly, I really like how the more expensive ones work way better and take less gravel.

Step 1: Clear area and level the base. I cut back a lot of plants and pulled a bunch of weeds. Our oldest dog is a digger, so I had holes and lumps all over the ground to deal with. Taking a metal rake and a shovel, I scraped along the ground and shoveled dirt around until the area was fairly level. I was careful to keep the side along our house a little higher than the rest to help with drainage.

Step 2: Enclose the space. The fencing that I used for the kennel area is fantastic. It can run straight or turn at angles where each section of gate connects. It doesn’t look bad if you have to fudge it a little bit by overlapping to make it fit, either. You can buy sections at a time if you’re not sure how much you’ll need, but it was pretty easy to figure out that I needed 10 ft along one side and 13 feet along the other. (The back side was just the house wall, and the last side of the dog area was already enclosed under our deck.)

Starting right against the house, I shoved in a pole/stake to hold that end of the gate in place, then connected the next section of gate with a pole running between the first and second sections. It was easy to do this in a straight line, adding sections of gate and poles until I reached my planter box at the other end. This was my 13-ft side. Here, I took another section of gate to make the corner. Then I ran more fencing along the planter box, overlapping a section in the middle to get the right overall length of about 10 feet. I had a very narrow gap at my planter box’s corner, but I just used a leftover pole/stake and shoved that into the box’s dirt to block off any escape attempts.

Installing this fencing took me literally 10 minutes.

Very easy + Looks nice + Sturdy and secure against my 65-pound mutt = 👍

Step 3: Lay the landscape fabric. I had quite a bit of this leftover from another yard project, but I had to buy a roll to finish. This is pretty easy once your ground is level, because all I had to do was roll it out from the house to the fencing on the far end. Scissors cut the fabric well, and then I took the roll and started again to cover the next strip of ground. I overlapped each strip a little bit to help cover everything, and it helped to use my rakes to hold one end down while I rolled out each strip.

It’s worth noting that I had a sprinkler head right smack in the middle of the space. When I rolled the fabric over this spot, I cut a hole and made sure the sprinkler head had plenty of room to stick through. (More on that later, as I had to take this into consideration with each following step.)

Step 4: Lay out the paver forms. Again, I wish I’d bought these paver forms, but I used these more flexible forms and eventually found a way to make them work by adding these anchoring spikes. The flexible forms do NOT come with enough spikes to secure the forms if you’ve got a dog (or kids) that are rough on the space. I found after laying them and after filling everything with gravel that they too easily pulled up in the middle where there were no anchor spikes, and the forms being loose ruined the whole point. 🤦‍♀️ BUT, if secured with more spikes through the little holes here and there, the forms stayed quite well.

So, learn from my mistake and make sure you secure these forms down really, really well.

Anyway…I stretched out and unfolded the flexible forms and spread this wide mesh across the space, securing it at one end, then the other. (I now know I should have secured it everywhere I could with extra spikes, so do that now.) I do like that they come with little fasteners to attach one side of one strip to another side of another strip, and it’s pretty easy to make one, big form this way to fill the space. The material also cuts pretty easily with scissors, so you can adjust the size and shape more easily than you can with the more heavy-duty forms.

Cutting here and securing there, I eventually covered my space with the forms. I made sure that a big opening allowed my sprinkler head to have space. I also made sure to add extra anchor spikes all along the exposed side to hold that down where the dogs would be running a lot.

Step 5: Fill with gravel. After hauling 10 bags home from Lowe’s in my Jeep, I got smart and ordered 35 more bags to be delivered so I didn’t cause a smelly mess in my Jeep. When figuring out how much you’ll need, take your square footage and look at what the bag says about coverage. I needed 130ish square feet, and it needed to be about 3 inches deep. I ended up needing about 50 bags total.

It was heavy, dirty work, but it was satisfying to dump each bag and then spread the gravel into the forms. I made sure not to fill the circular form I’d made around the sprinkler head, and it kind of looks like a little drain in the middle.

Done! I had some hiccups with this project, but once I got those extra anchor spikes in, these forms worked pretty well. Our older dog can’t dig as easily with the forms in place, and the gravel certainly looks better than the dirt mess that was there before. The below picture was taken about a week after I finished, so you can see how I might want another bag of gravel to cover the forms now that the gravel has settled, but I don’t mind seeing the pattern of the forms a little bit. The important thing is that our dogs can’t move them anymore!

And in case you’re wondering, this is what the end result looks like with the more heavy-duty forms, which I used under our deck and on the side of the patio that we humans use. 🙂

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