Adventures in Remuddling

It’s a good thing I finished the wall before last month’s winter storms hit our area. Three snowfalls within a week netted almost 2 feet of snow.

Underneath that pile of white snow is the wall I finished a few weeks ago.

Here, is the wall in its finished state. Even though I saved some of the heaviest stones for the top layer of the wall, I still plan on back-buttering with some mortar to them to keep them from wobbling when weight is applied (when I walk on them, for example). This will have to wait until spring; I want to make sure the wall doesn’t shifted incorrectly during the frost heave.

View of top stones

One of the lessons I’ve learned from this process: “Construction always takes longer than you think.” You would think that after working on my house for over a year, I would know this in my bones, but no…I still underestimate the amount of time to do the work. My initial estimate was 2 or 3 day…a week tops (Serena laughed when I made this statement). In the end it took about 2 weeks, though it also included lost work days because of inclement weather. Another thing about estimating work: you have less hours in the day to do the outdoor work (like landscaping) in the fall/winter than in the spring/summer. That is, unless you live on the Equator.

Some of my resources include:
Article about Building a Dry-Stacked Stone Wall from move.com (which I think they sourced from someone else).
The book The Art & Craft of Stonework: Dry-Stacking, Mortaring, Paving, Carving, Gardenscaping by David Reed. Out of the half dozen books that I borrowed from my local library system about the subject, this book was the best.

More pics of the wall:

Land leveled in front of wall

Wood chips and mulch as ground cover so that soil doesn’t wash away with spring rain.

Update: Wall has been capped