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.