41–50 of 60 posts
Is there an optimum somewhere between a fully-mortared wall and a drystone wall? i.e. mortar which gives some reinforcement but also allows rain or groundwater to run out?
Just down the road there's another, less attractive, example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.885003,-2.0568722,3a,46.6y...
I'm from Mallorca, a little Mediterranean island near Barcelona, and we have a great dry stone walls tradition there. The people that do it are called margers in the local language. They never really disappeared, and they finally formed a guild a couple of years ago. Here are some pictures if anyone is interested: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&biw=1745&bih=906&t... https://www.google.com/search?q=margers+…
I'm hoping to build one of these next year, along the 2' slope in my front yard that's annoying to mow and won't grow grass the same as the rest of the yard. It'd be cheaper and easier to do with manufactured blocks, but my spouse and I think a dry stone wall will look far better with our 100+ year old stucco/stone bungalow. And it'll be more engaging to build.
Just be careful if you're putting fill behind the wall--like all retaining walls these aren't really designed to 'hold back' anything. Their strength comes in compression, not lateral loads. At a bare minimum make sure you put a layer of crushed rock next to the wall, separating the dirt from the wall. This will mitigate water and decomposing plant material from resting against wall swelling and causing the wall to b…
Don't tell the Europeans that! You see them throughout the med:
https://www.google.com/search?q=stone+terraces+majorca&prmd=...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just be careful if you're putting fill behind the wall--like all retaining walls these aren't really designed to 'hold back' anything. Their strength comes in compression, not lateral loads. At a bare minimum make sure you put a layer of crushed rock next to the wall, separating the dirt from the wall. This will mitigate water and decomposing plant material from resting against wall swelling and causing the wall to b…
> aren't really designed to 'hold back' anything Don't tell the Europeans that! You see them throughout the med: https://www.google.com/search?q=stone+terraces+majorca&prmd=...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I clean - pull everything out, assess, and put it all away. It's very efficient if you have enough space, but it drives people nuts because they see it as causing more of a mess.
My wife attempts to use this method, but usually gets distracted at peak-messiness and things just end up worse off than they started.
It was my method first.
She must have stolen it from me. ;)
>There are examples of dry stonewalls and structures that date back 5000 years and are still standing today. Nearly anywhere in the world where stone of suitable sizes was plentiful, walls were built. What I'd like to know is are there any patterns to where the second is true, but said walls haven't lasted thousands of years like the first sentence says? Are there places where ancient stone structures could have been…
I don't know about thousands of years off hand, but if you spend some time in New England you will see the truth to the poet's words: Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Many, most, all of the dry stone walls once in pasture and now in forest used to be straight, neatly stacked wal…
A secondary cause for spilling the upper boulders is the behavior of herds of dairy cattle, with each cow reaching over the wall to reach that one extra blade of tasty grass, with eventual wall collapse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an excellent rule for cleaning up (a room, a house, an office...): touch any given thing once at most. In extreme cases, it doesn't work because you don't actually know where things are going to go, in which case a two-round approach is good: everything gets pulled out and sorted in round one, and things go to their destinations in round two.
That's how I clean - pull everything out, assess, and put it all away. It's very efficient if you have enough space, but it drives people nuts because they see it as causing more of a mess.
Contrast that with a transaction-based approach to cleaning where an individual item is moved to it's destination place/state, then you move on to the next item. No middle state where things are worse, and you can stop at any time yet still have gained the benefit of any work completed to that point.
However, with the second approach it's key that everything has a suitable destination 'home' to be moved to. Often, that 'home' is the trash can :)
Is there an optimum somewhere between a fully-mortared wall and a drystone wall? i.e. mortar which gives some reinforcement but also allows rain or groundwater to run out?
In the Bluegrass region of Kentucky [0], there is a rich heritage of stone fences, which are associated with thoroughbred horse farms, but they exist throughout the area because of the abundance of limestone rock available. It is one of the highest concentrations of dry rock structures in the US [1]. There is a similar organization, the Dry Stone Conservancy [2], that runs a similar certification program and workshop…
It's short 1/4 mile hike from the road.
http://cprr.org/Museum/Sierra_Grade_8-2003/Donner_Pass-Summi...
http://www.calexplornia.com/china-wall-truckees-memorial-chi...
I'm from Mallorca, a little Mediterranean island near Barcelona, and we have a great dry stone walls tradition there. The people that do it are called margers in the local language. They never really disappeared, and they finally formed a guild a couple of years ago. Here are some pictures if anyone is interested: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&biw=1745&bih=906&t... https://www.google.com/search?q=margers+…