Building A Backyard Skating Rink

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen a peek at our backyard skating rink.  If you have no idea what a backyard skating rink is, allow me to introduce you to the reality that is winter in Minnesota. You see, from the months of roughly October to April, Minnesota becomes a frozen, dark, frigid, windy, snowy tundra in which doing anything outdoors involves an element of physical pain.  As the winds begin to howl and the temperatures drop well below zero, finding the motivation to penetrate the subzero conditions begins to fade.

One of the many crafty ways Minnesotans have come to escape the winter blues is by building skating rinks in our backyards.  In fact, if you drive through the streets of Edina, you might even come to think it's the norm.  My husband Jeff has been babying his backyard rink for several years now and has been schooled in the hard knocks of rink building a time or two.  Today I'm outlining the steps to take if you are thinking of building a rink of your own and a few tips and tricks from a veteran rink builder.

Assess the yard

The first step in building a rink is assessing your yard to see if you are a good candidate.  To start, you need a relatively flat yard.  This doesn't mean that your yard can't slope or dip or angle one way or another, but the flatter canvas you are working with, the less water and materials you'll need to bring the rink to fruition.

While assessing the yard, get an idea of how big you want your rink to be.  Remember that if there are areas that are substantially lower or higher than the remainder of the yard - avoid them and plan for your rink to remain within the bounds of the flat portion of the lot.

Pro tip: If this is your first year building a rink, start small.  Inevitably, you'll learn a thing or two on your first go at it.  Adjustments and mishaps are easier to correct on a smaller scale.  

Gather materials

Once you've assessed the shape and size of your rink, it's time to start gathering your materials.  The rink will be made up of boards along the perimeter with braces to hold them in place.  In addition, you'll need plastic to line the rink that will also protect your boards from rotting and spare your grass from inevitable wear and tear.

Start by ordering your liner.  We order ours through Blue Lake Plastics which is out of Sauk Centre, Minnesota.  The liners are available in a variety of widths and can be cut to the length you need in 5' increments.  You'll want your liner to span the length and width of your rink as well as wrap up and over the top of your boards.  This protects the boards from rotting and allows you to get a couple years of use out of them.

To keep the liner in place, we bought these metal clamps off Amazon.  They aren't 100% necessary, but they keep the rink looking tidy and prevent the tarp from flapping in the wind on a blustery day.  We spread them out about every 6-8'.

For the boards, we went to Home Depot and bought sheets of 4' x 8' particle board or plywood.  While you're there, have the team at Home Depot cut your boards down for you.  We needed our boards to be about 16" high, so we had them cut the 4' wide boards into 3 even 16" high by 8' long pieces.  This allowed us to get 24' of length out of a single sheet of plywood.  Having them cut down at Home Depot also makes transporting them a ton easier.

To know the height you need for your boards, you need to do a little math.  Our yard has a slight grade to it making it higher at one end than the other.  That means that in order to get skateable ice at the highest point, we needed to have substantially thicker ice at the opposite end.  Once the rink was frozen, we had about 4" of exposed board on one end, and about 12" on the other end.  Make sure you can have a minimum of 3" of water at your shallowest point in order for the ice to be thick enough to skate on.

The final materials you will need are braces for your boards.  Truthfully, there are a ton of products on the market for bracing boards that range in price from next to nothing to hundreds of dollars.  We opted to buy simple 2x4's and cut them down into 14" long pieces for bracing.  Remember that once your rink is frozen, the braces really don't serve much purpose so don't feel like you need to invest in anything too pricey.

A box of standard wood screws and a handful of 9 inch metal stakes and you are good to go.

Building your rink

You have all your materials, it's time to put it all together.  Start by laying out your boards to build your rink perimeter.  Jeff uses the 2x4's he cut down into pieces to attach each board to the next.  This allows him to get the boards up and securely in place before he starts bracing them.

Once the perimeter is built, he uses the remaining 2x4 pieces as a wedge between the ground and the board.  He went as far as to mitre the edges on one side of the bracket to make fastening more efficient.  These brackets are placed every 8' where two boards are joined by a 2x4 strap.  The brace can be screwed right into the strap buttoning all of these elements together.

Once the brace was screwed into place, he drilled a hole perpendicular to the ground through the brace.  He pounded one of the stakes into the hole for additional support.

Once the boards are up and braced, it's time to lay your liner out.  You'll center the liner over the rink and position it so there is an even band of excess that travels up and over the boards all the way around the perimeter.  Once you have the liner in place, clamp the liner to the boards every 6-8' to prevent it from flapping.

Filling the rink

It's time to fill your rink!  It's worth noting not to get too excited at this point.  If you are using your hose to fill it, depending on the size, this will take some time.  Our water flows out of our hose at roughly 540 gallons per hour.  Our rink, which is 24' x 40' holds about 4,000 gallons of water.  That's nearly 8 hours of hose time to fill the rink.

If you can remain patient, use the time during filling to continue to assess the rink.  Watch for leaks in your liner or boards that need additional support.

The optimal temperature for filling your rink is when conditions are in the low 20's.  If you fill your rink when temperatures plunge too far below that, the water will freeze too quickly.  When your rink starts freezing in sections, you end up with ridged, lumpy ice.  Ideally, you would fill your rink like a swimming pool and the ice would harden in a uniform fashion.

A note about maintenance

There is a good deal of maintenance that comes along with a backyard rink.  Keeping your ice smooth requires regular flooding.  Again, you want to be sure you are only flooding when temperatures are optimal and you can blanket the entire surface uniformly with water before it freezes.  Remember that your exterior water supply is shut off at this point, so it requires running a hose from inside the house.  Some suggest using hot water when flooding to melt down any cracked, coarse areas of ice and provide a smoother surface.  Any rink builder will tell you flooding is an art form and your medium will be perfected over time.

If I haven't managed to talk you out of a backyard rink just yet and you are holding on to the nostalgia that provoked you to build the rink in the first place, then keep reading.  Each day as my kids pile out of the car after school, they immediately head to the garage and lace up their skates.  It will be a couple hours before I manage to drag them in for dinner and homework as the neighborhood kids will have joined them by now. The blustery Minnesota evenings will feel a little bit warmer and a whole lot brighter under the glow of the twinkle lights.

Backyard Skating Rink

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