Make your own "Runway" in the garden

Some who visited my contribution to the Patio of the Year at Nordic Gardens in April have asked how I went about making the decking that lay on top of the floor covered in wood chips.

I made the railing partly to create spatiality by delimiting different surfaces and partly to reduce wear on surfaces.

I made my "runway" from wood that could not be used when a production went wrong. The dimensions of the wood I used were 28x70, 2 mm thick rusty steel wire that had previously been used as a wire railing and U-shaped bars that can be found for a few tens at well-stocked hardware stores. I would not make the walkways in thinner wood because the U-shaped bars would otherwise easily break the pieces of wood. The wire that was used makes the trolley stable and does not move when you walk on the trolley. A tip is to cut up all the pieces of wire when purchasing as it can be difficult to cut the wire with a regular wire cutter, but special pliers for cutting wire can be purchased.

The two decks used at Nordiska trädgården have been supplemented with another deck that has not yet been oiled with a grey shade of oil and has now been placed on a gravel surface in our garden. I have chosen to make each deck about 2 meters long so that they can be easily moved if necessary.

This is what I did:

1. Nail a wire into the first board with two nails on both sides of the board. (I tried to nail the nails at an angle so that the tip of each nail is far from the top and bottom of all boards but so that the wire runs in a straight line when the entire deck is nailed. I did this so that the tips do not protrude from the top or bottom or tear the boards).
2. The following boards were nailed with a u-bolt on each side and to get an even distance between each board I used the narrower side of a decking board as a template when nailing the following boards. I made sure to have a stable hard surface when nailing the u-bolts so that they would rivet the wires properly and so that the distances between each board would remain the same.
3. I finished each plank in the same way as the first board with 2 coats.

Email any questions to hello@febthirty.com .