O Wall! O Sweet, O Lovely Wall!

The wall is complete! (Apart from a few details... )

Many people better educated than myself might recognise the above quote from "A Midsummer Night's Dream".  You might think that this would be the most appropriate quotation for me (despite my failure in English Literature 'O' Level!), as I savour my hard-won success.  However, given the way I feel right now, a rather more appropriate quotation is found just a few lines further on in the same opus: "O Wall! Full often hast thou heard my moans"!

I sit here feeling very tired after a long and hectic day's work.  I had finished off the stone structure on Tuesday and today was the icing on the cake, or rather the copers on the wall. I'm quite surprised that I have built most of the structure using stone that was already at the property; all I needed to acquire was the faced stone (including the pintle blocks for the gate hinges) which forms the quoin.  I was pleased that it was pretty level for the coping stones to be laid, and also when I made a small framework to lie on the top I proved that it was pretty well parallel as well.  I used this to draw a line showing the width of the coping stones and, hence, where I needed to grind an angle on the (few) protruding bits.  There is a bend in the wall - I didn't want to make this too easy for myself! - and of course I had forgotten about the coping stones when I designed the bend.  This bend was required because I didn't want to uproot the ivy climbing up the boundary wall, which would have been necessary if the new wall had been straight.  Another difficulty was that the soil rises in the direction of the boundary wall, so the foundations required a lot of thought.

Today I hired an angle grinder again [Top Tip: buy your own blade if you think you'll hire one more than once] and spent the morning cutting and grinding in preparation for the afternoon when my son arrived (with grandson) to help with the difficult bit - lifting the copers carefully into position on their mortar bed.  Since the heaviest weighs about 45kg, you can imagine that I had quickly decided that this was too much for me. I made a mix of NHL (sharp sand: building sand: NHL3.5 in 5:1:2 ratio).  This is basically standard 3:1 but I added the local building sand which gives a good colour match to the house pointing.  My grandson loved the mixer but was otherwise confined indoors as I had to wield the grinder again to make the last coping stones fit. 

However, in my haste I made too much mortar and so after my son left I spent the next three hours doing pointing and minor repairs to use it up; I gave up when it started to rain as dusk was falling.

I'm pretty pleased with the result.  A lot of thought has gone into this wall; I find that things usually turn out better if you think long and hard before you start, and try to imagine exactly how things will be done and what problems might ensue.  (There have also been a few sleepless nights.)  My vision was to build a security wall which would look as though it had been there for years, and I'd like to think that I have succeeded.  However, I'm glad I'm not doing that for a living - I started in May and thought it would be done by early July!