KY father turns front yard into homemade ice rink. ‘We’ve had a lot of fun.’
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Frankfort father built front-yard rink by repeatedly spraying thin water coats.
- Family learned skating quickly; neighborhood friends joined sessions of free skating.
- Rink depends on subfreezing nights and may last only days as temperatures rise.
Jordan Hall received strange looks from neighbors while he was recently watering his front yard.
Their confusion was understandable. Not a single blade of grass was visible, as snow and ice had completely covered his yard.
The temperature hadn’t cracked 32 degrees for several days, and it wasn’t forecast to do so anytime soon. It wasn’t exactly ideal gardening conditions in the final days of January.
“One neighbor told me that they were driving by the first day they saw me watering the ice and thought I’d gone crazy trying to get the grass to grow in the middle of winter,” Hall said.
Hall wasn’t going crazy. Rather, he was acting on an idea that would provide hours of joy to his family amid a brutal stretch of winter weather that left the less creative stuck inside with fewer choices for entertainment.
Hall lives in a Frankfort neighborhood with his wife and four children. He and his neighbors are in a neighborhood Facebook group to stay up to date on the latest neighborhood news.
One day, one of his neighbors, originally from New Hampshire, posted in the group asking if anyone was going to make an ice skating rink. She even provided instructions on how to make one.
“I guess that’s common practice up there during the winter,” Hall said. “She said it gets below freezing and stays below freezing for long periods of time and was wondering why nobody was doing that around here.”
The more Hall thought about the post, he realized he could do it. The temperature wasn’t supposed to rise above freezing for several days, and he thought his children would enjoy skating around the yard. So he started researching how to turn his front yard into a sheet of ice.
Hall had skated only a few times in his life, mostly at the ice rink in downtown Lexington. His kids, ages 6 months to 8 years old, had never ice-skated. They didn’t even own skates.
He bought some used skates on Facebook Marketplace and borrowed others from another neighbor who was from Minnesota.
Hall said he started making the ice rink by pushing all the snow in his yard off to the side to form the barrier around the rink and expose the layer of ice underneath. He then used his garden hose to spray a thin layer of water on the rink and let the cold temperature freeze it.
Hall said he sprayed his yard for about 10 to 15 minutes and let it freeze for a couple of hours before repeating the process several times.
“We started out on Thursday. I probably got three or four coats down on Thursday,” Hall said. “Thursday night it got down to like 10 degrees, so it froze really well.”
Hall applied a few more coats of ice to the rink Friday, and by the time his kids returned home from school later that afternoon, the rink was ready to be tested out.
“I let them walk out and try it, and it seemed to be holding them well,” Hall said. “Then I got on the ice to see if I can actually skate, and it held my 210 pounds pretty well.”
Then it was the kids’ turn to start skating. Hall’s 6-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter started out using chairs as support, but they quickly shed the chairs.
“They’ve gone from where they could barely stand up and couldn’t stand without support, to now they can skate circles around just free skating with no support, no hand-holding,” Hall said. “It’s been amazing how quickly they have developed that skill.”
Hall and his family have spent several hours on the ice rink since. He has even invited friends and other family members over, and he said there were about a dozen people on it once last weekend.
“We’ve had a lot of fun,” Hall said. “For the amount of time it took and the expense, it was minimal for the fun we’ve had.”
The ice rink has also served as a powerful lesson to his children, proving that they can pick up a brand-new activity with just a little practice and effort.
“They’ve learned that they can start something that’s challenging and do something hard, and get better at it and have fun,” Hall said.
Hall’s homemade ice rink won’t last forever. The temperature is expected to start rising above freezing this week, which will eventually melt the icy surface away.
However, there are still a few chilly days and nights in Frankfort’s forecast, and Hall is hoping a few more garden hose sprayings will extend the rink’s life another week.
“As long as it’s below 20 degrees, it seems to freeze – I use a garden sprayer, and it freezes almost instantly, especially at night and especially if there’s wind,” Hall said.
When the rink does melt and temperatures rise, he is already feeling the pressure of what homemade activity to create next.
“We’ll have to think of what’s next,” Hall said. “I don’t know where we go from here.”
