Canadian Thanksgiving was this past weekend and if you know me you know that's the weekend that I start putting up the rink. The weather always seems to be great that weekend and the ground is still soft to drive the stakes into the ground for the braces.

I had to replace my corner boards this year. I made the curved 2x4s by cutting them out of 2x10s. They actually came out pretty good. You can also see my new purchase this year - REAL NETS! No more of those Costco ones. I'm so excited to use them but they are awful heavy.



Here's one of the finished products:



All the other boards were taken out of storage and were given a fresh coat of paint:



I managed to get half the boards up on Saturday and the rest went up on Sunday afternoon while everyone else was inside watching football and cooking turkey. I also had a bonfire going burning all the old boards:



Next step: Clean up all the leaves and wait for the cold weather!

Looking Good!
You don't have to wait for the grass to go dormant?
I was going to put mine up soon, but figured it had to wait another few weeks.


-I'm really jealous at how flat your yard appears to be.

Thanks!

Tarp will go in middle of November but I like to put the boards up before I freeze my butt off doing it and before I need a 50-lb sledge to drive the stakes into the ground. :-)

Yard appears flat but there is still considerable slope from left to right in the picture. By the end of the season, I'll end up with 5-6" of ice on the north side and 12-14" on the south.

Got my rink built and due to the slope of my yard, the layout started about ten feet from my fire pit.

Is that too close to burn?

Depends on how big your fires get. :-)

In the pic above, the boards are about 6 feet from the fire bowl. It was definitely easier to get the fire going with the wind being blocked by my boards.

Hosted our own Winter Classic on New Year's Day before one of my goalies had to head back to school. We had two goalies and 7 skaters, played two on two for hours: