Getting Your Backyard Play Area Ready for Summer Holidays

Six or seven weeks of kids at home, starting mid-December

Term 4 wraps up in mid-December across most of the country and Term 1 does not begin again until late January or early February. On the published 2026-27 state calendars, Queensland state schools break up on 11 December and students return on 27 January, Victoria finishes on 18 December with students back on 28 January, and New South Wales finishes on 17 December with eastern-division students back on 3 February. Read the NSW calendar carefully, because the week before that is staff development days, so teachers go back ahead of the kids. Every state and territory sets its own dates and they shift by a week or so year to year, but the shape is the same everywhere. Six to seven weeks at home, sitting right across the hottest stretch of the Australian year.

For plenty of families the backyard becomes the default childcare for that stretch. Whatever is wrong with it in November will still be wrong every day in January, at 35 degrees, with three kids and a neighbour's kid in the middle of it.

Why the work needs to start in September

September and October are when the trades fill up. Landscapers, fencing contractors, base-work crews and shade sail installers are all booking into December by the time the weather turns warm. If the yard needs more than a tidy-up, the booking is the long pole in the schedule, not the labour.

There is a weather window to respect too. Base work wants dry conditions to compact properly, and a fresh turf install settles better if it gets a few weeks before it cops daily traffic. Laying turf in the third week of December and expecting it to handle a trampoline, a slip-and-slide and a paddling pool from day one is optimistic.

A countdown that leaves room for things to go wrong:

When	Job	Why then
12 weeks out (mid-September)	Walk the yard, list every hazard and dead patch	Costs nothing, and it surfaces the surprises
10 weeks out	Book trade work, order shade	Calendars are still open
8 weeks out	Measure up and order turf	Room for delivery and a rain delay
6 weeks out	Base prep and install	Dry spells are easier to find in October
4 weeks out	Infill, brush, set equipment back out	Surface settles before heavy use
2 weeks out	Heat check, hose habits, ground rules	Fresh in everyone's mind

Walk the yard the way a six-year-old uses it

Do a lap with a notepad before spending anything. The list tends to write itself: bindi patches through the lawn, the bare run-up to the trampoline that turns to mud after rain, a gap in the fence line, garden edging at shin height, and the corner where nothing has grown since 2023.

Sort what you find into three groups. Hazards get fixed regardless, so that is the loose paver, the rotted step, the gap in the pool barrier. Surface problems are the ones synthetic turf solves, so mud, bindis, dust and dead patches. Comfort problems are shade, water access and somewhere to sit, and they quietly decide whether the kids stay outside past 11am at all.

Our play areas page covers what turf fixes and what it leaves alone in more depth. This guide is about the sequencing, so the work lands before the holidays rather than during them.

Heat is the part most plans miss

A dark synthetic surface in full December sun gets hot enough to hurt. Independent Australian measurements have put unshaded artificial turf in the 70 to 100°C range on hot days, well above nearby natural grass, and our guide on whether artificial grass burns bare feet sets out the numbers and the management habits in full. It matters more in a play area than anywhere else, because kids stay on a hot surface far longer than an adult would before complaining.

Three things move the number, in order of how much they help. Shade does the most work: a sail, a tree canopy or even a fence's afternoon shadow beats every other lever. Water is next, and thirty seconds with the hose buys a genuinely cooler window until the surface dries out. Fibre colour and yarn treatment come third. Among our range, Summer 30 Super uses APT's COOLplus IR-reflective yarn, which the manufacturer states delivers up to a 42% increase in IR reflectivity against the same fibre untreated. That is a manufacturer's test figure rather than an independent one, so treat it as a useful tiebreaker between products, not a substitute for shade.

Book the shade sail in September if you are getting one. It is the single most effective thing on this list and the hardest to arrange in December.

Picking a surface that survives the whole break

Holiday traffic is different from ordinary weekend use. The same patch gets run over dozens of times a day for the better part of two months, and a pile that looks plush in the showroom can lie flat by mid-January if the density is not there.

Pile height	Feel underfoot	How it handles a long summer holiday
15-25mm (budget)	Short and firm	Holds up fine for looks and light play, least cushioning
25-35mm (mid-range)	Soft with good bounce-back	The practical pick for most family yards
35-45mm (premium)	Plush, most give	Best cushioning, worth it if the yard is an outdoor playroom

For most backyards a dense 30mm product such as Comfort Plus 30 is the sensible middle: soft enough for tumbles, dense enough that a worn path does not appear by New Year. As general market context, mid-range turf runs roughly $30-45/m² and premium roughly $40-60/m² supply only, inc. GST, with professional installation typically adding about $30-70/m² on top and DIY base materials landing around $10-20/m². For our own current figures, see the pricing on each product page.

Trampolines deserve their own think. Anchoring behaves differently on a compacted base than in soil, and the legs will flatten the pile underneath them over a summer, which our guide on putting a trampoline on artificial grass works through properly. Sort the anchoring method before the base goes in, not after.

What turf will not do

Landscape turf over a standard compacted base is softer than baked dirt or short dry grass, and it is not a certified soft-fall surface. Playground equipment is designed around rated impact surfacing matched to the equipment's fall height, and our products over a standard base do not carry that rating. If there is a swing set, a fort or monkey bars in the yard, put certified soft-fall in the fall zone and run turf everywhere else. Better to know that in September than after a fall in January.

Ordering without a last-minute surprise

Turf ships in fixed cut lengths, commonly 5m, 10m, 15m or a full 20m roll depending on the product, at a fixed 3.71m roll width. Shorter than a full roll carries a cutting fee. There is no cut-to-your-exact-area option, so the planning job is picking a length that covers the area with sensible offcuts, and for a yard wider than 3.71m, working out where the join between rolls will sit. Put that join somewhere out of the main run of traffic if you can. Our guide to measuring your yard walks through the sketch-and-measure process, and each product page has a calculator that turns those numbers into a length and a quantity.

Two other things to check early. We supply only, so installation is your job or your landscaper's, and a landscaper booked in October is far easier to find than one booked in December. We also do not ship to Western Australia or South Australia, a hard block at checkout rather than a copy footnote, so check that before planning around a delivery.

Frequently asked questions

How long before the holidays should I order turf?

Aim to have turf ordered about eight weeks out, so late October for a mid-December deadline. That leaves room for delivery, a weather delay on the base work and a few weeks for the surface to settle before it takes daily traffic. If you are hiring a landscaper rather than laying it yourself, work backwards from their availability instead, because their calendar will be the tighter constraint by November.

Can I lay turf myself over a few weekends in November?

Plenty of people do, and a small play area is a realistic DIY job if you are comfortable with excavation and compaction. Budget two weekends rather than one: the base is the part that takes the time and the part that decides whether the finished surface stays flat. Dry weather matters for compacting the base, so build a spare weekend into the plan.

Will the turf be too hot for the kids in January?

It can be, and that is worth planning for rather than hoping around. Unshaded synthetic turf has been measured in Australia at 70 to 100°C on hot days, which is hotter than the air and hotter than nearby natural grass. Shade over the areas kids stand still in, a hose-down before bare feet go out, and a cooler paved or timber path through the busiest spots handle most of the risk. Light-coloured, IR-treated yarn helps at the margins.

Do I need council approval to put turf in the backyard?

For a private backyard behind the building line, almost never, as our guide to council approval explains. Synthetic turf is generally treated as a landscaping surface rather than a structure, so it usually sits outside the development approval process. The exceptions worth checking are heritage overlays, strata or body corporate rules, front yards and nature strips, and any change that affects stormwater drainage across a boundary. A quick call to your council before you order beats finding out afterwards.