Brooke here:

Remember a few weeks ago when I picked through some stone scraps?  The stone was delivered today.

The back yard has a hard slope.  We’ve been planning to put a retaining wall between the section where the garden stairs end and the Vestigial Lawn begins.  The retaining wall is not really a priority, except other projects which are a priority can’t be finished until the wall goes in, so the wall has to go in.  Retaining walls, man.  So totally OCD about retention.

When the wall is finished, it will follow a natural curve in the land.  Really, the space is begging so hard for a retaining wall that we won’t have to do much digging.

Stone for a 30-ft wall should have cost upwards of $1000, but the old granite stone for the wall came in at a third of that.  I was wary of using boring gray granite, though, until I did some image searches for reclaimed granite walls and came across some beauties by Hammerhead Stoneworks.  This company integrates reclaimed granite with local stone to make a spectacular blend.  They are also local, operating out of the Asheville area, and we can get the types of stone similar to those used in this blend right here in town.

Four pallets arrived today.  The first is concrete slabs to be used with the fence project; more on that later.  The other three are as much reclaimed granite as I could get my hands on, with an extra half-ton of stone in various reds, golds, and blues.  And check out these sexy, sexy tool marks!

This stone has been sitting in the yard for a dog’s age, but oh, man, if we do this right it’ll be spectacular.  We need to get the fence done before we start on the wall, the stone needs to be pressure-washed to get the funk of ages off of it, and I have to hunt down some smaller-sized red pieces to fill in the tiny crannies, but this will be a very solid project when it’s done.  Don’t hit me.