Curved Fieldstone Wall: Part 1, The Plan
Drumroll, please! Our next masonry project will be to rebuild a curved fieldstone wall in our front yard.
Who’s excited for this one?
*raises my own hand*
I am excited for this project mainly because this fieldstone wall has become a major curb appeal issue, and not in a good way. Remember the children’s rhyme about Humpty Dumpty? Now imagine Humpty Dumpty sitting on the wall, and the reason he fell off was because the wall collapsed under him.
That’s the sketchy situation with the wall in front of our house.
Most of it is a low, curved fieldstone wall that is only a couple of feet high. There is, however, a slightly taller curved section that connects to the front porch and serves as a retaining wall for the flowerbeds.
We do need to remove a tree stump right by our mailbox in order to rebuild the wall properly. Removing stumps is always fun said no one ever.
We’re also not entirely sure about how successful we will be at rebuilding the wall section to the left of the gate because it hugs the tree.
We all know how trees feel about hugging. A short one is fine, but if you linger too long, its roots are going to throw you off. Ask every uneven sidewalk I’ve ever tripped on about that.
To be clear, we are not rebuilding the ENTIRE wall to the left of the gate. That section is probably 200 feet long. The idea is just to work in the immediate vicinity of the gate for now, but don’t hold me to that. Let’s see what fresh horrors await us how things go first.
Now, some of you might be wondering why we plan to rebuild the curved fieldstone wall instead of repairing it. I appreciate your inquisitive nature. I’m sure your teachers loved you.
If you’ve learned nothing else from this blog it will be that concrete is bad for fieldstone, and much of this wall has been repaired over the years with concrete or some other cement-based product. So there’s that.
In addition, it is my understanding that a car crashed into the wall at one point. I don’t even know what to say about that, but you can imagine the damage it did to all persons and things involved.
What I can say is that while we would prefer to repair the wall, unfortunately, we are 20 years past that point.
We need to chip off all the old concrete from each stone, and then piece this wall back together with lime mortar so that it’s no longer brittle.
Rebuilding the wall also gives us the opportunity to reshape it slightly. We’re keeping the curve, but also talking about adding a couple of upward swoops on either side of the gate.
When I say “we,” I mean Handy Husband is talking about it. I’m wondering if I can actually build it. I’m the only amateur stonemason in this dynamic duo, so the task would fall to me.
Keep in mind that I’ve never built a curved fieldstone wall. (Small detail I’m ignoring.) I have built fieldstone stairs, and done loads of repointing work, but never built a wall from scratch.
However, I am relatively confident (perhaps falsely so) that I could build one swoop. I’m less confident that I could build a second swoop that is an identical mirror image of the first one.
But perfection is overrated and quirks add character, right? Unless you’re paying for it. Then you want it perfect. It’s a good thing my labor is free.
The point of adding the swoops would be partly for interest, but mainly because it would allow us to attach the gate to the wall. It’s currently attached to wood posts.
Speaking of the gate, it is also in rough shape. I have plans for Handy Husband to build a new gate. I’m just waiting for the right time to spring that on him.
In terms of the mailbox, I don’t know what we’re going to do about that necessary evil.
The snowplow has hit the mailbox a couple of times in the six years we’ve lived here, so I don’t want to invest much time or money in something that has a high potential of being crushed in the snowplow’s version of the old Frogger game.
Now that I’ve told you all the problems we have with the current fieldstone wall, I did mention in the title of this blog post that we have a plan for building a new one.
It’s more of an idea of a plan. That always works out well, right?
But seriously. The plan is to dismantle the current wall. That shouldn’t be too hard (famous last words) because it has halfway dismantled itself. Then determine if any additional problems have been hiding in plain sight. There usually are things that we can’t see prior to demo. Last, we’ll just go for it, and start rebuilding the wall stone by stone.
The question that remains unanswered is will this be the project where we put too much dip on our chip? Stay tuned to find out if we are in over our heads!
As always, feel free to reach out by leaving a comment on this blog post, emailing me here, or reaching out via direct message on Instagram or Facebook. You can also follow along on stories to see all the nitty gritty details as the happen!
Thanks for following along. It makes us so happy!
If you’d like another blog post to read, the least I can do is suggest one of these oldies but goodies:
Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 2, Demo
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