The Great Wall - Day 4

No need to delay the inevitable. The Great Wall is complete! The wall part at least, nothing else.

Bask in the glory that is geometric patterns of form pressed stone composite material!

This past Saturday consisted of 10 hours of picking things up and putting them down. Only I had to glue said things and place them in an appropriate pattern. And by appropriate pattern I mean I had a basic pattern for something that isn't a wall and used that for the first half, then started to just put the stones wherever they fit for the second half. Still with glue. So moderately permanent, hopefully.

See all the squiggles of glue? That was a whole tube.

A pattern begins to emerge!

After spending many hours meticulously laying down the first course of stones and ensuring the straightity and levelitude, the rest of the stones went fairly quickly. Goes to show that doing proper prep work makes the rest of the job quicker. Hopefully I learned my lesson and apply this to my next projects. Although it looks like cleaning up from this one is going to be a project by itself. Wondering if I can just ignore it till it cleans itself up or if I could hire out for a sweet montage segment where it gets done in 30 seconds.

This came up when I did an image search for 'sweet montage cleanup segment'. Seems appropriate.

If you have to build a wall or some other type of stone based monument in your yard, I highly recommend these RumbleStone stones by the PaveStone Stone Company. Or the Stone Brewing Company, either will do. The stones all just fit together perfectly. Even when I went off pattern and started free forming the wall it still worked. Just make sure you have enough of each type of stone and you can build pretty much anything. If you build it, they will come.

Look at the patterns!

31.75 feet of perfectly fitted masonry.

The one thing to pay attention to however is to make sure you have enough landscape adhesive to get the job done. I drastically underestimated how much I would need, 3 different times. When I got my first set of supplies I figured 5 tubes would work. The tube said it would cover 31 feet and I assumed that meant 31 feet of wall, which is exactly how long my wall is. Well it meant 31 feet of goop, not wall. So after doing the first couple courses of stone and some of the columns I ran out and had to run to the home improvement store. This time I got a case of 12 to finish up. Figured that was plenty.

A few hours later I went back and got 6 more. That had to be enough.

Then I had to go back and get 4 more....

Finished the step with 1 tube left unopened.

Like the aftermath of a crazy party. 500 used tubes of adhesive, a plastic lawnmower and one empty beer bottle.

Once the wall was up and sufficiently glued together I had to put nice capstones on to make the wall look pretty. Apparently even walls have feelings. But then I had to build a step! What is a wall if you can't easily climb over it? My first idea was to build an inset step that went up to the patio. I had been wracking my brain about how I was going to do this as part of the wall without messing everything up. Then I had a brainstorm. Well, my brainstorm was to fret about it to my staff at work. That was all I needed though! One of my guys, Dan, said "Why don't you just build a step in front of the wall?"

He wasn't a free mason but I still requested his help.

That is why I hire A players for my team. Critical thinking skills that I lack. That makes me the best manager ever basically.

They love and adore me.

Yeah, if you could just come in on Saturday and build the patio for me, that would be great.

All I needed to do was take the stones I had left over and build a half wall step thing. Amazingly enough, I actually had left over stones. Back to the pre-planning part... I had guessed how many rocks I needed. Did some measurements and then just plain old guessed when I got to to the home improvement store. Amazingly I ended up with only 2 flat stones (which I promptly broke trying to chisel them in half), a handful of mini ones and probably more than my fair share of square ones. I was thinking that wasn't too bad but as I'm writing this I realize that I need to figure out what to do with those extra rocks... I'm sure I'll think of something. Maybe I'll put turrets on the wall. And a moat!

Trying the Flintstones method of writing this blog.

It isn't an exact science though....

Now that the wall is done I just need to deal with the ditches on either side of it. Link has gotten fairly adept at jumping over the ditch then using the small stair to get down to the yard. The Wee One isn't as lucky, nor as agile as the dog. With that the wall is really separating two different projects. On one side I need to till up the yard, level it, and then grow a new lawn. On the other side I need to build a patio. Both sides are huge projects that I have no idea how to do. But hey, if I can build a wall then I can build anything!

Can't decide between a joke about the tiny wheelbarrow or the spent adhesive tubes.

- The Porter -