Sunday, September 16, 2018

Starting the Wall in the Front Yard

After months of work, we have the trench pretty well defined, at least up close to the house.


We've got the rock out, and even the dust.  Now we need to start putting a wall up along the property line.  This will keep the neighbor's grass from growing over into our yard (and whatever we put in our yard from growing into theirs).

As with the back yard, we use bags of mulch and compost as sandbags to form up the wall.  We use the dirt on one side and a piece of Masonite board for the other, spacing them with 2x4s and 1x4s, pouring ready-mix concrete between them to for the wall.


Once we are done with the first section, we move the forms down and do the next section.


This gives us a base section of concrete.


But we want this to be a base concrete wall with white limestone rocks on the top, like our other walls.  We can use 4x6 and 4x8 stones, so we need the wall to be tall enough that we can mortar a 6 inch or 8 inch stone on top and create a straight line wall top, so we need the wall to be 7 or 9 inches from a line from the back stone work up to the street (where an iron pin defines the property line).  We stretch a piece of string along this and readjust our Masonite forms to be the right height, and pour more concrete.


Again, we slide the forms down and do the second section.


And then a third section.  First the bottom part.


And then the top part,


and when the forms are removed, we have the first half of the wall done.



A bit more than half.  This part is 30 feet long, from the back there to where it stops in the middle of the yard.  The remaining part, from there to the street is 25 feet.  So slightly more than half now.  This took 45 80-pound bags of ready-mix concrete, costing $180.24 (Home Depot).

After a little more cleaning up of the lawn edge,


we can put in another section.


This took another 10 bags of concrete.





Now we have a concrete wall that stretches from the house almost to the street.