NATURAL STONE RETAINING WALL, DETAIL TIPS ADVICE HOW TO BUILDING TUTORIAL, ROCK MASONRY CONSTRUCTION

Hello and welcome this is Carl the Landscape Guy. There are so many different types of natural stones from which you can build decorative walls. Shaping the stones is a lot of hard work and softer stones like sandstone is easier to shape and form. You will find some detailed sandstone videos on my channel. But what about brittle and hard rocks? During shaping, they can break or split easily. Vangjeli thinks you can use any kind of stone for a wall. Today’s video is about a 2.5 m high and stable retaining wall made of greywacke stones. In particularly, today is about the stability of retaining walls and the process of corner building. We are working with a really hard greywacke stone. You can already tell that the wall will look very good with nice light-dark contrasts. This is a retaining wall that holds very well and is stable. Without any extra concrete support behind the wall it holds up well by using a bunch of half meter long rocks that tie in deep into the wall. This way you can easily build walls that are three to four meters tall. The problem with this type of stone is that it’s difficult to work with. Because these are brittle stones and when you try to make a nice front or want to take away a corner they dont break where you hit it. They can break wherever they feel like it. They already have tiny cracks that aren’t visible. Especially making a nice corner stone is really hard. Nico is here working on one and it could easily break apart any second. Then you can just start all over and have also lost the time you worked on it. And for this reason, you want to pre-sort the stones in the quarry. It is very worthwhile when you take a small excavator and 2 workers to pick the right stones. That way we can pick and prepare about 50m2 of wall per day. For each vertical square meter of wall you need at least three big rocks with this length that tie in deeper. The deeper the better. If the wall is 3 to 4 m high, we have to start at the bottom with the biggest stones. Of course, this is only possible with appropriate wall thickness or like here in a retaining wall. If the wall comes to such a height then you have to use big stones. Because such a stone can not be walled like this, that’s not possible. In no case, even if it’s twice as wide i wouldn’t put it that way. I will put it in like this. Some mortar with it and in this way. Then we take the waste rocks and gravel. Here it is good that we have it because you can fill the gaps nicely with mortar. And then you can let the stones swim like that. Now we set this inside cornerstone. Now you might think why this way? Well because half of it will disappear later. That has to go like that because otherwise we can not make a proper vertical grout in the corner. We don’t want the two wall parts to move apart. Not every layer has to be that way but we do like every third one. Also keep in mind that it should not be too cold or too wet when building your wall. We stop building when it gets colder than -3 ° Celsius. Then we cover the wall up with fabric over night. But when it rains, the problem is that the stones are wet and the greywacke stones won’t draw water. The mortar doesn’t thicken up by itself and since the rocks don’t draw any water the grout can flush out and it will look bad. Because it is raining we will have to wash the wall next day. To make such a corner you can not use thick layers of mortar. Especially with this weather. The stones must sit on each other even without mortar. The mortar does not hold the stones it only fills the gaps. Otherwise you will have to wait before putting the next row of stones on top. Because the mortar will squeeze out. You see that here, the stones sit on each other even without mortar. If you put the stones swimming on mortar of course you can not make the next row on it. We always have to make sure we can continue to work all day. Not two rows and go home. There are people who say I just put more mortar under the stones and it will be fine. Then you can put one more row on it maybe but the second and third row on top won’t stand. Then your joints squeeze out and your wall opens up and falls apart. Thanks for watching, it was very windy today and I apologize for the sound disturbances. If you would like to see more about our natural stone works and tipps, I put together this playlist for you, so make sure to check it out. Good luck with your projects and see you next time. Im Carl the landscape guy. #masonry #construction #wall