Knowing permanent cold is just around the corner, I took the last two days to finally finish the brick wall I started back in June. It didn’t take more than a few hours on Wednesday to finish planting the base row(s) and stack the rest. For the record my estimates were about as close as someone with no wall building experience could get – we did indeed end with a wall 8 bricks high (as predicited way back in June) and I ended short just 15 bricks. Pretty good for trying to estimate and count in my head.

Then on Thursday we paid a shitload of money for a shitload of quality topsoil. We needed dirt to fill in our newly leveled landscaping and, in addition to running of out other places around the yard to pilfer it from, wanted to get some decent dirt for planting next spring. So we get some dirt brought in. Two problems:

1. They couldn’t dump it inside the area that I needed it, so I spent today shoveling a pile of dirt from the yard to the landscape area
2. One shitload of dirt isn’t even close to what we need. My guess it three shitloads to fill the area – and paying three shitloads is not something I want to do right now.

So my back is sore, but a I have a sweet retaining wall finished along the from of the house with the section nearest the front door left opened-ended so that it can either function as it stands or be continued along the sidewalk and around the front of the house if we decide to go all over-the-top ambitious in the spring.

So without further ado, the wall that still needs 15 bricks and two shitloads of dirt.

A blog history of the wall project:

June 10
June 15
August 2
August 30
October 22