Tag Archives: stone walls

You get a stone wall. And you get a stone wall. Everyone gets a stone wall….

June 21, 2025 Rivergirl 26 Comments

This is the area where we did most of our exploring while in Rhode Island.

We stayed in Newport at the end of one peninsula but drove up and over and down another through Tiverton, Little Compton and Sakonnet.

Beautiful places all, but one thing that always stood out?

The stone walls.

Everywhere.

In front of every house.

Some beautifully maintained and manicured…

Some tumbling and overgrown.

I live in Maine, we know stone walls. Our home alone has three, well… four if you count the one you can’t see down back in our woods… on our property. Our neighbors have none.

But in this section of Rhode Island?

They’re everywhere.

On both sides of the street… for miles.

In Maine, some stone walls have been in place for hundreds of years. They came about when farmers needed to clear fields for planting or livestock. The stones were dug up, hauled away and used as fences.

Necessity, meet invention.

But today if you build a house and want a stone wall? Prepare to pay.

We had a friend who built them for a living and did very well.

We haven’t had contact with him for almost decade but I remember the last time we saw him on a job in 2016… he was charging $1,000 for every 10 feet, plus the cost of the stone which will make you gasp.

I can only imagine what he charges now.

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Cat crazy

June 15, 2022 Rivergirl 14 Comments

Lord Dudley Mountcatten has been strolling the newly rebuilt stone wall with trepidation. Cats are serious creatures of habit and anything out of the ordinary is met with suspicion.

But Mr. Sissy Pants doesn’t like to dampen his feet on the morning dew either and will do most anything to avoid wet grass.

Never walk a straight moist line when you can circle around on dry bricks.

Yes, he’s in there somewhere.

And if it’s alright with you, I’d rather not tell him about the article I saw the other day..

The last thing Dudley needs is a throne.

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Holiday weekends rock.

July 28, 2021 Rivergirl 19 Comments

But at our house, not in the way you might think.

This is one of our stone walls. It’s the smallest and has been falling in on itself for years.

Mainly because when my husband built it 19 years ago, he didn’t listen to me and dug it level to the higher edge of lawn.

You can’t tell but there’s over a two foot difference in height there.

Anyway… on July 2nd, the start of the holiday weekend, I came home from the grocery store and found this.

Because the husband decided July 4th was the perfect time to redo the corner of the wall where stones were starting to slip into the ditch. He enlisted a friend, dug a trench and figured this jerry rigged engineering marvel would work.

A slab of untreated wood, a line of black stakes and yes, God help me… roofing shingles to hold back the dirt. Not what I would call aesthetically pleasing.

There was a discussion. Followed by a heated debate. Which turned into the beginning of an argument. I offered multiple solutions and they did not go over well. Naturally the husband wanted to do as little lifting as possible because, you know… rocks = heavy. But if you’re going to rebuild a wall? You can’t just do one section, and after some (not so) gentle persuading, he finally saw it my way. Since the slipping stones were his main concern I conceded defeat on that point and we eliminated the corner.

Filling it in with dirt which we will then seed or sod.

And then the real work began.

If you’ve never built a rock wall? (And I mean a real New England cement free rock wall, with rocks of all different shapes and sizes and weights… not the nice flat ones you buy at a landscapers) Trust me, it’s work!

Which is undoubtedly why my husband only wanted to do a corner.

Silly man, he really should have known better.

Day one? It went something like this:

Move rocks, install barrier, argue with wife, remove barrier, curse wife under your breath, fill hole with dirt, move rocks, curse wife again, start rebuilding entire wall when all you wanted to do was one corner, move rocks, curse wife under breath one more time because you can and she’s too far away to hear you.