Stone Walls

Ahmed Hassan: There’s whole lot of different types of walls you can build and those have all different functions and purposes. Today, what I’m building is a small decorative wall, just something that’s going to help me to retain some slope that I have here and it’s going to look good, maybe also observe as a bit to see.

The great thing about building a wall like this is that you can do it in bits of pieces. You basically want a footing and it’s about 6 to 8 inches of concrete for a wall this size. The footing is basically an anchor for your wall. I’ve set that first layer of stone into the concrete and then I’ve stock this stone and I put the rubble in behind it, I know. And I’m talking about it, let’s go and build ourselves a wall, all right.

When it comes to my breakfast I kind of like my oatmeal nice and thick. You also want your footing kind of thick. The reason is because you’re going to take this ready mix and you’re going to use this to actually start stocking stone today.

A weep hole is basically a little sleeve. In this case, I’m using a 3 quarter inch piece of PVC and I’m going to put this in the wall so that any water, pressure that’s behind here can at least get relieved through this little hole.

All right, so let’s start stocking some stone. Add a little bit of mortar mix up and all we’re using the mortar for is to really add here each of this stones together. It’s also not a bad idea to go on and dry stack your stone, in advance to see what you like and you can pull those stones off, add the mortar, put them right back in place. This is ledge stone and I’m finishing the top with flag stone which is about the same color. So if I'm going to need this to have a small piece of stone, I can always use a piece of flag stone because the colors were matching, they work the same.

And sometimes, you custom modify your stone with a hammer or rock chisel. You want to make sure you get pieces stock together fairly well on their own and then apply your mortar. Otherwise, all of the strength that your wall is dependent on this little mortar that’s field with sand, it’s not very strong.

I’ve got my step by step by step, meaning I can come layer this and make sure that there's no running seam in between my blocks. You then take some rubble and start working on your backfill. Then by rubble, that could be any rock that you have. You might need to buy some drain rock if you don’t have any on sight. Then you can backfill with your soil and any water that does find its way to that little spot is going to release itself to our little weep hole, well covered.

So there you have it. Take out you garden hose, wash the wall down and if you want to maintain this look of the stone when its wet, you can always apply a sealer to it and that will keep this look for a few years.

From the most elaborate garden wall to something simple like we’ve got here, all it takes is a little bit of know how, well, and a lot of stone.