Masochist Mauer

Finally an Update!!!

2008-10-21T10:42:00.005-04:00

So it's been about 5 weeks since my last update. I finally got in a bit of work on the past weekend, which allowed me to finish the section I had started weeks ago. In all, I now have about 10 feet of completed wall, which is something like 8% of what I'm hoping to do.

In other news, I won the novice class of the Dry-Stone Conservancy Walling Competition a couple weeks ago, and I'll post a few pics from that below.

Here are the pics from the competition.

Corner completion - new sections started

2008-09-13T21:11:00.006-04:00

It's been a while since I've posted any signs of progress and I'm sure there are those who would think that I had been completely stalled. Though this is not the case, I certainly have had to scale back my time investment, since law school is a particularly grueling and jealous mistress.

In my spare time, I've been able to dedicate anywhere from a half hour to two hours at a time, and have gotten the corner done, and have started a new section. The pictures below illustrate how far I've come. Hopefully the new section will be completed (coping included) by the end of this next week.

Tie Rocks - School looms

2008-08-24T19:10:00.007-04:00

Three courses completed today! After I laid the 3 courses to make a total height of 15'', I placed two tie rocks (or through rocks), about three feet apart. I can already see that these will make a big difference in the stability of the wall.

These are pictures before I put the through rocks on:

This is after I put the through rocks on:

Time will be limited this week but I trust that I finish this section by the next weekend.

Back from the beach - 2 more courses follow 4.5 hours of work (it appears that I'm still slow)

2008-08-23T23:52:00.005-04:00

The beach. And the stone I got.

Well I'm back from the beach vacation w/ the in-laws in Edisto, SC. Sadly I don't remember seeing a single native stone while I was there. Lots of sand though. Shells too.

In any case, the only substantial portions of rocks seen by me were organized piles of granite boulders, which they (not sure who) had put on the beach at 200 meter intervals to prevent erosion by the rip tides. The stuff had almost certainly been shipped from up north, and it had been cemented together to prevent scattering.

However, toward the end of the trip on Thursday, a storm arose, prbly the afterbirth of hurricane Fay which had by that point begun in earnest the raping of Florida. The weather was wild (not wild enough to stop me from swimming in it and getting pretty beat up), and the riptides were such that some of these granite boulders were broken off from the piles and had been worked on by the surf. I saw a piece of one washed up on the beach. It was a 30 or so lb remnant of something bigger, which I judged to be quite manageable in weight and size, and so carried it a mile back to the beach house and brought it home in order that I may incorporate it into the wall. I reckon that way I can say it's got a piece of Vermont granite in it. I reckon now I also should have brought some of those verdammte see shells for packing the core of the wall. But no matter.

Getting back.

We got back last night and I began building this afternoon. I would've started earlier, but I had to travel into town to obtain my textbooks for the semester. I started about 2 pm and finished about a quarter after 7. Given that I took a couple of breaks to seek respite from the sun and its 90 degree heat, I prbly only put 4.5 solid hours of work in to lay 2 courses. In any case, the wall is now 10-12 inches above the foundation and is 3 courses tall.

Tomorrow's plan.

For some inexplicable but yet certainly sadist reason, it seems that most law professors require students to read an assignment before the first day of class. Thus, it will be quite impossible for me to dedicate a full day to the work, owing that I have class the following day. Plus it'll be Sunday and normally I wouldn't work on a Sunday, so I'll be taking it easy as well. However, I do reckon that if I put my mind to it, I can (w/o exhausting myself) do another 3 courses.

Since 2 more courses will put the wall at about 15'' height above the foundation, it will be expedient for the following course to contain the tie rocks, since the height of the wall below the coping is to be 30''. Hopefully I'm being realistic that I can get that done tomorrow.

Btw, pictures of my planter.

These are two pictures of the planter I built on a whim back in late May or early June. Though I now realize that structurally speaking it isn't the best example of lasting stonework, I tend to like it anyway for its odd charm (I built it in the corner of the cistern and its steps) . It was the building of this that convinced me that I would be able to build a proper wall if I got serious about it. note: Inside the planter is a sweet basil plant, a cinnamon basil plant (what the hell can you use cinnamon basil for besides muffins?), a chives plant and a red cherry tomato plant.

1st section of first course completed (yeah this is srsly gonna take forever) - Vacation looms

2008-08-14T22:23:00.004-04:00

So I completed the first course for the first 10' of wall. Counting yesterday (when I started on the first course), I'd say I put in a good 3 hours of actual work w/ the stone, not to mention the preparation. Lesson to be learned: I have to get faster, but not at the expense of the quality of the work.

This evening I did manage to get faster/more efficient than I was yesterday. I made an executive decision based on some advice from two frequenters of Britain's Dry Stone Walling Association forums. (Dave from SW Ireland and Tracey from Yorkshire.) http://www.dswa.org.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=339.

I decided that I would try to find rocks that were roughly the same thickness, but I wouldn't waste time picking through the pile for a very particular thickness and shape of rock if I couldn't immediately find it. If I did that every time, I would always be looking for the perfect rock, and at some point all I would have left would be shitty-ass rocks. So I decided to just make the choice-of-rock decisions fast and work with what I have.

So though I will work in courses (as is the tradition here in Kentucky w/ most rock fences), at times the courses may come to resemble a random rubble wall. The courses are going to vary in height along the way, but I'll lay one course and then pack it, lay the next, pack that, until I get halfway up in height, where I will level off the courses at 15'' above the foundation and place the through (tie) rocks. Then I'll return to the random height courses until I level it out just below the cover stones. Luckily I have plenty of very flat nice cover stones (I dug them out of the creek bed. I'll get some pictures of these stone anomalies.) Then I'll do the coping. But to hell w/ the coping right now. That's a long way off.

So...pictures!

These three pictures are of the 1st course before I packed it:

This is after I packed the 1st course (I worked until after the sun set, so I'll get a clearer picture in the morning):

Also, I finally scanned in a rough copy of the schematics of the garden. The actual wall part of the drawing isn't done in much detail and it's not done to scale either. However, most everything else is done roughly to scale (the length and width of the wall have been increased to about 2 feet past the numbers indicated.) More explanation below the picture...

Inside the wall, most all of those dividing lines indicate raised beds for different vegetables. The raised beds will be demarcated by small stone retaining walls about 6'' to 10'' in height and about 6'' thick. If you look closely, you can see what I'm planning on planting where. The middle is going to be an open space, and the surrounding retaining walls will reflect that it is a circle by the curvature of the walls. In that open space I'm going to pave it with small stones and hopefully put a cool pattern in it.

But unfortunately the project will have to be on hold for about 8 days (Tomorrow until the 23rd of August.) Vacation w/ the in-laws.

Limited Progress on the wall proper

2008-08-14T10:20:00.008-04:00

Last night I finished up the section of foundation that was necessary to the first portion of the wall. After I was done, here is what it looked like:

After that I set up the batter frames. (for those of you reading who are n00bs, the batter frame sets the slope of the wall, which is 1 inch inward for every 6 inches of height. This means that since the wall will need to be 14 inches across on top and is 30 inches in height below the coping, the wall will be 24 inches at its base.) Setting the batter frames and leveling out the lines took quite a while seeing how I had never done it before. I spaced them only about 11 feet apart, b/c I want to only build about 10 feet at a time. (I've heard that trying to build very long stretches at a time gets too discouraging).

Then I started laying rock. Apparently (and this makes sense), it's said that one should lay the biggest rock you have in the first course, but the rock I chose to start with on the first course may have been too thick (4 to 5 inches). I say it's too thick b/c I immediately found out (should've realized this earlier) that I did not have a generous supply of 4 to 5 inch thick stones that had a clean face. And if they didn't have a clean face, then I wanted to save them for the rest of the foundation. Thus after laying maybe 8 feet on one side, I began to wonder if I should've just started out with smaller stones.

So my questions are (feel free to comment if you know better):

1. Should I be careful to match the stones carefully in height, one next to each other? Or can I lay (for example) a 2.5 inch thick stone next to a 5 inch stone next to a 4 inch stone, and then just deal with it on the next course?
2. Should I just start out with smaller stones and save the ones that are thick and good for corner pieces, and wherever else they happen to fit etc?

The Foundation: (In part)

2008-08-13T11:32:00.016-04:00

Below is what my garden looked like when I was ready to start building. Those gigantic plants on the right are tomato plants. Though all of the corn had been picked as of August 2, everything else was thriving, so I couldn't just cut it all down to make the wall. I decided I would have to work around things.

With the corn harvested, it was time to get to work on the first section of the wall, which would be about 41.5' long. The first thing I did was to cut the corn down. Then I proceeded to dig out the roots of the corn stalks, so I could dig the shallow trench easier.

Once I had cut all of it out and put the remains with the stalks in a compost heap, this is what it looked like:

At this point I set my lines and began the back-breaking work of digging the shallow trench (about 5" deep & 30" wide), and carting the dirt away to a nearby pile.

Finishing this trench took me several hours in the hot sun, so once I was done, I didn't do any more work that Saturday (August 2).

The next Tuesday (August 5), I began to lay the foundation stones. The foundation would essentially look like a stone footpath about 30'' wide, and the stones would need to be basically the same thickness (about 5"). Not only that, but the stones would have to be hauled one at a time from the rock pile and be carefully laid next to the previous stone, making sure that I pinned any rocks that were unstable w/ smaller rocks underneath it. Then there was the packing. Though it has been said before that "packing is for pussies" I know that the wall won't be worth a damn w/o it. (The 'packing' is the practice of filling in all the empty spaces between the bigger rocks with smaller rocks, until it's packed full.)

So I took special care to pack the stones well, using breakage from the bigger stones that I had to break when they wouldn't fit. I found that I had essentially no waste (unusable rock) left over from the stones I used for the foundation.

The next day (August 6) I was able to get this far:

This is me taking off a high spot in the stone w/ a chisel.

As of this past Saturday (August 9), I was able to basically finish the foundation for the 41.5' stretch.

I planned to start the wall from the corner seen in the picture immediately above. To do this, I'll have to lay some foundation extending perpendicularly so that I can avoid having one wall disconnected from it's adjacent wall. (better pictures on the way!)

Getting the Rock

2008-08-12T23:49:00.011-04:00

August 1 - Once I decided upon this project, I began telling people what I intent on doing. I figured that if I told people, I would be committing myself to produce some results. Despite giving repeated assurances that I was wholly serious about the wall, most people were doubtful that I would actually haul 30 tons of rock for the purpose of building a wall that besides looking (hopefully) good, arguably had no function except maybe keeping rabbits out.

My wife didn't really doubt me. Rather she was concerned, b/c she knew that I was intent on dragging heaps of stone into the yard. This she knew since I had hardly announced my plans when I began hauling and dumping truckload after truckload of rock into the yard.

How many loads?

On average, each load of approximately 1500-2000 lbs of rock would take more than an hour of intense labor to pick up/pry up out of the creek bed and to dump next to the garden. I knew that I probably needed a ton of rock for every 3 or 4 feet of wall. Since the wall was to be in excess of 120' in length, I knew that I would at least 30 tons of rock. I figured that 40 loads ought to get the job done.

Where to get the rock?

After looking at several sites with considerable amounts of rock, and of course finding virtually no old rock walls whose rock I could cannibalize, I decided that I could get most or all of the rock out of a nearby creek bed. Luckily the creek bed is almost always dry during the summer, so at least in theory, the rock would be easy to gather. What I usually did was to cut the brush out of the creek bed and drive my beat up truck down in the creek and toss rocks into the bed until it got so full that I wouldn't be sure if I'd make it out w/o destroying my truck. This proved sometimes extremely difficult, due to larger rocks needing to be pried up and broken into smaller manageable pieces. And of course there were always the mosquitoes. And the people who would stop (since as you can see the creek runs along the road) and ask what the hell I was doing.

Usually I tried to pack the truck until it wouldn't hold any more. I knew the load was really full when both the front and back of the truck bottomed out as I crossed a part of the creek to get back up to the house... That and when the engine is screaming and the clutch is burning, and the damn thing is hardly budging. Already having 220K miles on it, this may be the last hurrah for my truck.

Having made a sheet which included slots for 40 loads, I would shade in the slots as I got the loads. As of this point I've only done 27 loads, but already I have such a mountain of rock that one of the 4 or 5 piles that I've made is easily 7 feet tall. I could tell that my landlord and my wife were starting to get nervous that I would do nothing but gather rock until I lost interest, and then there would be a mountain of rock perpetually sitting under a tree by the plank fence, a lasting testament to my inability to finish blah blah blah...

In any case, they never voiced this concern, but I could feel it coming, b/c most of all I was beginning to get scared that I'd haul rock until my time ran out and the semester began (I'm in law school), and I'd get nothing built. So I decided to stop rock hauling once I got 27 loads and recommence the hauling operation once the advanced building stage of the wall commanded that I get more rock. My decision to start building was also in large part supported by the fact that building had just then become possible (on August 2) b/c I had just picked the corn, and the back wall was to go in the precise spot where the corn had been grown. So in all, I had been hauling rocks since early July, and had not really built anything yet. However, just for the hell of it, I had stacked some rock as I unloaded it from the truck, as seen below in this 7 foot high pile of rock. But don't be deceived. The actual wall will be much more carefully constructed.

These are very flat stones that I'll use as the cover stones for the last course below the coping.

Now to dig the foundation!

A Masochist's Wall.

2008-08-05T08:46:00.008-04:00

About the title: "Mauer" is just a German word for wall. It's a "masochist Mauer" b/c only a masochist could derive satisfaction from so much back-breaking work.

This is a blog about building a rock wall. It's to be done with the dry-stone method (w/o mortar), and will enclose my garden in a 42' by 25' wall of 42'' in height (not including a 5'' foundation).

Normally I would say that such a topic would be too uneventful to justify a blog. Yet my wall is destined to be different. Truth is, many others have built rock walls in the past, but unlike me, they usually had a good reason to do so, like getting paid or b/c they have mad skills and the rock was just sitting there... None of this applies to me. I can't easily articulate a valid reason for building a wall that requires so much work, I'm not getting paid, my dry-stone skills are still severely limited and none of the rock was just sitting there. In fact, it would require an insane amount of back-breaking labor to scour 30 tons of workable limestone from nearby creek beds with only a sledge, a pick-axe and my 1986 4x4 Nissan pickup. (see the next post, Getting the Rock)

Why I'm Building a Wall:
The short answer to this is that I visited Switzerland in June of this year for the European Soccer Cup. While there I noticed that the Swiss seemed to take pride in the fact that their buildings, sidewalks, roads, fences, etc were very precisely built with extreme attention to detail. Not only that, but they were made with quality materials and were made to last, something I cannot say about most construction here in the states. In particular I noticed the stone work, which amazed me most of all (See below pictures).

(Bern, Switzerland)

Upon coming back to the states I had a strange desire to build something out of stone. I had previously this summer built a small retaining wall for a planter next to our cistern. Now I wanted to build something bigger, and I wanted to make sure it was done right and most importantly, last a very, very long time. That's when I came up w/ my idea for a rock wall.

The Plan:
First I had to come up w/ a place to build the wall, so that it would make sense to other people when they found out that I was building it. This especially applied to my wife, who I figured would probably want to know why I was intent on dumping 30 tons of rock in the yard. I reckoned that the best place would be the garden (see below).

Of course I would have to get the rock first and then dig a shallow trench for a foundation. ...not mention hammer out the fine details.