Many homeowners prefer to build stone walls, because it could provide better durability and strength compared to standard brick wall. When we are thinking about a stone structure, it isn’t about castle. However, because the wall is constructed from pieces of stones, it will be heavier than normal one made from lighter bricks. In general, stone is a bit similar to concrete, but it can be obtained naturally. Both are weak in tension, but strong in compression. It means that we can’t create a tall and thin structure made from stone or concrete. With a stone structure, we can make our house looks more beautiful.
A stone wall often incorporates mortar and if we want to make it higher, we should also use internal framing for support. High stone wall with no internal metal frame could fail within a few years. In this case, we should decide how far our stone wall should stretch inside the property. Before we construct the wall, it is important to make sure that it will be straight. So we could use a long string as a guideline. This will help us to make sure that the wall is perfectly straight. It would be time consuming and expensive to fix a stone wall that veers off course. In order to make the wall stronger, we need to excavate it.
In this case, for each 3 inch of width, we should dig down 1 foot. It means that if we want to make a wall with 6-inch thickness, we should dig down about 2 feet. The bottom part of the small ditch should be layered with gravel and we should make sure that it is distributed evenly. We could use spirit level, while adding and removing gravel as needed. If we have higher walls, the gravel bed should be replaced with concrete. We should fill the gravel until about 2-inch from the surface. The next step is to dry-fit our first course of stone and we should choose the flattest.
We could start by mixing our mortar and spread it out evenly on the gravel bed and we could put the stone and press it into the wet mortar. Repeat the process and each stone should be above one inch apart. We should make sure that these first stones we put are at the same directions and level. After we cover the whole ditch, we could repeat the process and put another layer of mortar on top of the first stone. During this period, we should make sure that we still follow the guideline provided by the string. Failing to do this could cause our wall to veer off course. It should be noted that chunks of stones should be arranged in staggered pattern; the same way we arrange bricks.
The uppermost part of the wall should look the nicest and we should choose the most proper stone. For the finishing process, we could scrape and wash away any protruding mortar before they get cured. Wet rags and stiff brush can be used to perform final touches when the wall is almost completely dry.
