Well what else do you do when it’s -15 degrees outside and you have an itch to play hockey? The idea of the rink came about one day when my roommate (flatmate) Gregor and I were sitting round talking about how his old roommate had built a rink in their backyard. So I was like “dammit, I’m buildin’ us a rink today!”, so I googled as many things as I could on rink building to figure out the best plan of attack. You can build them by building a snow wall and spraying water directly on to the ground, but this apparently messes up the lawn and takes longer to freeze, so I headed to Walmart and picked up a rink liner for $10 (big sheet of plastic) and filled it up with water. A day and a bit later and we had a fully functioning ice rink in our front yard 🙂
Getting the ice surface smooth is no easy task. I tried leaving hose on it for a while, but it just created a nice big lump on one side of the rink 🙁 Buckets of hot water did the trick, but it took quite a few to cover it.
