Building Stone Walls - Paperback

Rustic and charming or stately and proud, a well-built stone wall can add personality and beauty to your property. John Vivian's lively approach and step-by-step instructions encourage you to transform a pile of rocks into an enduring landscape feature with gates, retaining walls, or stiles to suit your needs. Whatever unique challenges come with your site -- poor drainage, sloping ground, or low-quality rubble material -- Vivian offers innovative designs and reproducible methods to help you build a beautiful, long-lasting wall.

Back Jacket

A beautiful stone wall ... yours with just a rock pile, a few tools and this book!

Building Stone Walls tells you all you need to know to build your own sturdy walls. Carefully detailed, clear drawings show the techniques to follow -- and how to avoid problems.

Learn here about:

- wall foundations

- basic "one-over-two" method

- chinking "in" or "out"

- height-to-width formula

- using lower-quality stone

- building retaining walls

- building in gates, fences, and stiles

- moving stone, boulders.

Excellent example photos show good and poor walls, while the author's lively text tells you how to build, step by step. Slopes, drainage problems, using rubble -- these challenges and more are thoroughly covered.