Strenuous relaxation
One way I’ve found to relax is to work on the dry stone walls that are scattered around our property. These are walls I’ve built from scratch, from pallets of what’s sometimes called Tennessee River Stone. I think I’ve put up on the order of six or seven tons of the stones into several walls in our front and back yards over the past few years. It’s strenuous–the rocks weigh around 30 or 40 pounds, mostly, though some may be twice that heavy on the high end–but it’s rewarding. Here’s what the wall in our front yard looks like:
It’s hard to get a sense of scale, but the wall is only about three feet high at its tallest, so it’s pretty small. On the other hand, it turns out to be visible in Google Earth, which gives me Great-Wall-of-China delusions of grandeur:
Building with stone is harder than with regularly shaped materials, as might be expected. Because I’m an amateur at this, it might take me a couple of hours to put a half-dozen stones in place, even though the rocks I’m using are nice to work with, generally having flat sides. There’s lots of eying rocks for fit, planning ahead, ensuring that the courses are level, jockeying odd-shaped pieces around, and so forth. Still, I think the results are worthwhile.
Very worthwhile. We had a stone porch pulled down a couple of years back and big plans on what to do with mountain stones that came from it - very nice, mostly very large rocks. Today, they still sit in a pile in the back. I did use some river rock to make a nice flower bed on the slope around the mailbox, but nothing on this scale. Judging by the amount of work that went into that, and the satisfaction from seeing it done, I expect the work and satisfaction from the projects you’ve photographed above were enormous. Very good work.