WE DID IT! Oh my goodness, we have officially finished the last of our rock walls and it feels so good….well mentally it feels so good…physically we are sore and tired.

So, as a quick recap, here is how the rock walls have gone over the last 6-7 years.

2016

We finally experimented with some rock walls after having the yard cleared the previous fall. They were big, clunky walls that took up way to much room and were over-kill for what we needed.

2017

Kurt becomes the human bulldozer and pushes in our main path which was the starting point for our rock walls. We completed the first large section of wall that goes from one end of our yard to the other, following the upper side of our path.

2018

We finish filling the upper side of the path walls. We get the lower side of our path wall built and ready to fill with rocks.

2019

We procrastinate about rock walls by re-doing our back gardens with some of the rock that is meant for our rock walls. We eventually get it together and fill the lower path wall. Kurt becomes a human bulldozer again and starts digging in the next tiers that will be our garden beds. By the end of summer he has all the tiers dug in and ready for more rock walls.

2020

The world stands still and yet we still procrastinate about building rock walls and instead pull apart the front yard garden beds and build planters. Once again we use some of the rock that is meant for the walls to fill these new garden beds. Due to COVID, I am put on layoff notice (not actually laid-off, just warning that they are considering it due to COVID) for 4 months. Anxiety ensues, so I take all that anxious energy and I build and fill 3 walls in 2.5 months. The most progress that we have in a single year.

2021

We mostly enjoy our new garden beds in the walls we built in 2020. Finally get our butts in gear and build the bottom wall for the left side of the yard.

2022

Get most of the walls on the left side of the yard built and filled. Truly believe this is the last year we will have to build rock walls. Procrastinate and the winter slams down upon us before we finish the last 2 half-walls (7.5 sections).

2023

FINALLY FINISH ALL THE ROCK WALLS! WAHOOOOOO!

Ok, so that catches you up to where we are now. Elated that we don’t have to build any more rock walls, while also being super stoked that we did this major project in our yard and it turned out so amazing. We love our rock walls and the look of them. Due to the way we built them, they have a very fluid, curvy look that follows the natural contours to the slopes of our yard.

I’m not going to lie. At one point Kurt and I were talking about packing it in for the day after we had finished a couple of the sections, thinking that we would just finish up the last few sections this week after work. If you have read the timeline above, you will note that we are excellent about procrastinating about the rock walls. We did end up talking ourselves out of stopping for the day and instead pumped each other up with the thought that we could just get it done and then not have to think about building another rock wall…which was way more appealing.

After 6 gruelling years of back-breaking work (with lots of LONG breaks between), would we do it again? ABSOLUTELY! Would we change some things? Probably…mostly the procrastination part, but the actual build…still possibly. I love the end product, our only concern is the wood fenceposts that we used. So young and naive about landscaping, we didn’t really think through what would happen in 20 years when those start to rot or break. We sell the house of course! Hahaha, just kidding. We have a few ideas on what we will do when that time comes, but for now we are just going to sit back and relax and enjoy.

Although we have many projects left to complete before we really get to settle in to just enjoying our dream yard, this was by far the biggest and most physically demanding part of the entire over-arching landscaping of the yard. Here are some stats about what we have accomplished, because I am a nerd and I like stats.

We used 23 yards of rocks to build the walls. 1 yard of rock is approx. 1.5 tons, meaning we moved approx. 34.5 tons of rock. We are calling it 30 tons to be safe, because there are some differing weights online listed for 1 yard of rocks. To put that in perspective, a fully grown, adult elephant averages 5 tons. So we moved the equivalent of 6 elephants around our yard. Yowza! The cost of all the supplies (wood, wire, landscaping fabric, rocks, etc) came to approx. $3,500. Considering what our yard looks like and all the garden area that we now have to grow food in, that was well worth the amount we paid for it all. Plus, we love gardening so it all brings us joy, even during the “building” stages.

We are now going to move on to our other yard projects and expect that we will now see things developing much faster as we go. That being said, we are going to take some time this spring and enjoy the fact that we don’t have such a huge project looming over our heads, and enjoy some camping and fishing during the spring. Once the garden is into the beds in a few weeks time, then we will start planning what our next projects are and which need to be completed first.

Thank you all for reading many posts about how we are building yet another rock wall.We appreciate you hanging in there with us and will now have a bit more diversity to the projects we are working on.