Paging Mr. Hadrian...

As wall building goes, we're not professionals. But we do okay.

After stacking all the various sizes and shapes of blocks in neat piles, we set about actually laying the foundation. One entire course of stones will get buried, and these have to be absolutely flat and level, because anything we stack on top of them ain't moving. So we exercised our best high school geometry to draw out the lines and curves we wanted.

As I mentioned earlier, most of the digging is way underground. Not just because the bottom course of blocks gets buried, but because our ground level is already too high and we want to lower it by a good foot or two. That means digging deep trenches before even the first blocks can go in. I was waist-deep most of the time, and tossing soil onto piles that were over my head. Thankfully, it's been warm and sunny all this week, because otherwise we might have been comfortable.

Once we got down to about the level we wanted, it was a matter of carefully putting some of the soil back in to level it. Every block has to be level front-to-back and side-to-side, but it also has to be at the right height and the exact same height as all its neighbors. Basically, the first block you set determines he position of all the others.

We'd dig out a bit, lay a few foundation stones, tweak them until they're straight and level, and then take a break. Then more digging, more levelling, more stones. We got the bottom course done in about three days.

The hardest part was laying the two curves because, well, they're not straight. But the stones are. To do an "outside" (convex) curve, you cut away part of the back of each stone to make it a trapezoid. That way, the fronts all fit together snugly while the backs are smaller than the fronts. Cue the angle grinder and diamond-tipped saw. Doing "inside" (concave) curves is easy in comparison. You just angle the blocks with their faces touching.

Once you've got the foundation course laid, building up the actual wall is relatively easy and kind of fun. You can place the differently sized blocks any way you like, but there are also suggested patterns that give a random look without funny-looking repeats or ugly gaps.

As of today, we're maybe three-quarters of the way done. The entire foundation course is laid, and about half of the wall. We've actually run out of blocks; we'll need to order a few dozen more. I can't wait to haul them in from the street.

The Stones Come to Pacific Grove

Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man who delivers rocks.

Our nifty little retaining wall will be made up of cast "stone" blocks that interlock together like really big LEGO bricks. You can find these in all different types, colors, and sizes, and we eventually settled on the style we liked. They had to be special-ordered (who would keep these in stock?), but that only took about a week.

Kathy and I made bets on how much the blocks would cost. My guess was lower; hers was higher. We were both wrong. It actually cost less than half of my low estimate. Bonus!

On the other hand, we were way off on the weight, and this proved to be punishing. They'll deliver the rock to the curb, but not onto the property. That's your responsibility.

I have to hand it to the driver/forklift operator, though. That guy is an artist with heavy equipment. He parked his huge truck in the middle of our street, casually blocking all the traffic, then unloaded his forklift off the back and proceeded to whirl it around like he was a circus performer on a unicycle. The entire load of blocks was on the ground in under five minutes, including lining them up nice and neat on the sidewalk. He could probably rearrange eggs in a carton with that thing.

Once he was gone we really missed him, because now we had to get all those same blocks into the backyard by ourselves. And quickly, too, since they were blocking the driveway. And it's uphill...

The invoice told us we'd just taken delivery of 7284 pounds of blocks. That's 3.5 freakin' tons! The largest and heaviest blocks weigh 75 pounds apiece; even the smallest ones come in at 18 lbs. Kathy would load three or four of these into the wheelbarrow and push them up the ramp to the backyard. I'd take a pair of the big ones on a hand truck. Over and over, rinse, repeat. If we'd been smart, we would've hired a couple of guys from the Home Depot parking lot.

By the time we finished we'd dead-lifted a total of 7 tons because, of course, you have to lift each stone at least twice: once to get it off the pallet and onto the wheelbarrow, and again out of the wheelbarrow onto the ground. That doesn't even count the work involved in humping it all up the ramp to the backyard. We figured we'd earned ourselves a greasy burger from the joint down the street.

If you need us, we'll be in the Home Depot parking lot.

Digging Dinosaurs

Poor little... whatever type of dinosaur this is. He's put up with a lot, including losing his companion to alien abduction. Now he's up to his neck in displaced dirt. That's one of the few places we could pile it without getting in our own way. We left his head out, though. There's only so much indignity a plaster dinosaur can tolerate.

Trench Warfare II

New project: Let's build a stone retaining wall in the backyard! How hard can it be?

In terms of engineering, it's pretty straightforward. But the labor involved? That's another matter.

We decided that the best way to deal with our sloping backyard was to terrace it. The neighbor's soil is at least a foot higher than ours, putting pressure on the fence. And the whole yard slopes, making it hard to walk on or enjoy. So we decided to push some of the dirt back toward the fence, and pull some of it forward. The result, we hope, will be two more-or-less flat areas with a retaining wall between them.

We started by laying out the now-familiar pile of bricks where we wanted the wall to go. You can see them here. The idea is to run part of the new wall straight, then transition into a semicircular curved section on the left side. That way we get a bit more "high" area to stash the excess dirt.

Then we used some boards to mark out the straight portions and to hold back the dirt once we started digging. And there's going to be a lot of digging.

We figure the retaining wall only needs to be about 2 feet high, but that's just the part you can see. We also need to bury part of the wall, for strength, making the whole thing about 32 inches from top to bottom.

Best of all, most of that 32 inches is going to be underground. The whole idea is to lower our average ground level, so we're going to have to dig out... well, pretty much the entire backyard. Question: Where do you put a backyard's-worth of dirt when you're digging up the backyard? Where does it all go?

In big stinkin' piles, that's where. We had to get clever about piling the dirt someplace where we wouldn't have to immediately turn around and move it again. (This strategy was not 100% successful.) The short-term plan was to shovel dirt from the high parts and throw it into the low parts, knowing full well that we'd have to shovel it back in a few days. but where else can it go? We don't have that much room to work with.

It's a bit like one of those puzzles with 15 tiles that you move around, trying to get them all in order. Except the tiles are big mounds of dirt, and it's hot outside.

Eventually, we did manage to dig a straight(-ish) trench to start the wall. We took the opportunity to bury sprinkler pipe, too, although that was almost more trouble than it was worth. Laying the pipe and putting in risers means keeping certain areas clear (no dirt piles) and it creates trip hazards all over the yard. Just adds to the excitement.