Thread: Looking for ideas/help with pathway

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Hello everybody!

My husband and I are trying to think of new ideas to line our pathway to prevent people from wandering through our yard and tripping over cords and ruining props. We ran into a few problems this last year with accommodating ToT traffic up to our house since we get over 700+ ToTs and their parents. Last year we lined the pathway with pumpkin lights to try to deter people from going into the yard and also lighting it up so people could see where they were walking. I wasn't too crazy with them and was not heart broken or shocked when they suffered a lot of damage.

I have been truely amazed at how creative many of the people here are on this forum and was wondering if anyone would have any other ideas or suggestions for lining the pathway, detering people from wandering through the yard, and also accommodating traffic up to and including two strollers passing side by side (yes, it happened more often than you would think, causing children to trip and jamming up the walkway).

Here is a picture of our house:

Beautiful home and yard! Personally, I'd simply build more fencing to line the path on both sides. It would enclose the yard/cemetery and provide a substantial barrier to traffic.

I agree with jdubbya about the fence. Seems that is the only way to keep them from walking in there. You could make the fence kinda go in a wavy pattern to go over the lawn a little bit to make the path wider but with that many tots you might not want that kinda traffic on your lawn. You did a great job on the fence and columns.

I don't really have good photos of mine, but we just used some pvc we had, dollar store skulls and plastic chain, originally i wanted pvc candles coming out of the top, but didn't get to it.

I too would go with a PVC graveyard fence. There are great tutorials here to help you.

Your sidewalk is simply too narrow for that kind of volume. If you put in fencing, it probably will get damaged too as ToTs pass each other coming and going. You're on the right path with the lights. I use rope light myself to guide the ToTs where I want them to go, but you have to set the lights farther from the sidewalk so that you can allow for easy flow. Yes, this will trample some of your grass.

Other options include, pouring a new sidewalk or adding pavers on both sides to widen the existing path

Nice house and yard. I could definitely see the pumpkin pathway lights getting bumped into and knocked down if there was traffic in both directions. They look to me to be too close to the sidewalk.

Have you considered temporarily creating a pathway from the front porch area to the driveway? I was thinking you could try to route traffic in from the front walkway (from the street--mark it Enter) to the house and then from the house to the drive way (mark it Exit) and out to the street again. With halloween so late in the year even with kids walking on a grass pathway to the driveway (use rope lighting to delineate the path) I'm sure the ground is pretty hard and the grass that gets trampled would grow back in the Spring anyway. If you get rain during this time of year, you could probably lay down some black landscape fabric material for the path and add some wood chip mulch on top to soak up the water. Then when Halloween's over, pick up the landscaping cloth with the chips on top and refresh any planting beds that could use the mulch for the winter.

Just a thought.

A pvc fence.
It helps alot.

Pvc pipe fence like everybody else said or you can put some rebar or stakes down and use rubber barbwire fence. The stuff is cheap looks real and will keep people out. When I ran out of fencing I used a chains on a stakes and barbwire.

I like Spookie's idea of an exit path to the driveway,along with a pvc fence. Another idea might be to just put a small table at the entrance and hand out the goodies there.

This is the fence we put up to keep people from stepping into our swamp. (And yes, that did happen the second year we put in the swamp.)