The Possibly Prettiest Wall In The World

The wall is done. Yep, you heard right – done.

Can’t believe it’s finished? Didn’t think this day would come? Well, yeah, we were also starting to think it would never happen, but it was definitely worth the wait!

The result is pretty amazing and so much better than anything we could have achieved ourselves.

The joints are all completely even, everything is level and we even have a proper gate post that finishes the wall off at the end.

You can still see the old concrete gate post on the left side of the driveway that Jan still has to remove and we also need to find a terracotta pier cap to finish the top of the new post, but that will probably involve a lot of hours traveling from reclamation yard to reclamation yard and a lot of luck to get one to match the one that would have been there originally.

Having a wall again really takes some getting used to. Our garden has been such a complete mess/building site/danger zone for such a long time now, that you almost get used to falling or breaking an ankle when walking over to the bins.

Thanks to some of the cleanest builders ever, we’ve now gone from this

To this

We’re really glad that we decided to take up a strip of the asphalt before the wall was built. It’ll definitely make removing the rest of it at a lot easier and reduce the change of us damaging our new wall.

Looking at the wall from the inside of our garden, you can see that the bottom three rows are made out of a slightly different brick. This is the way it was before (and would have traditionally been made, too.)

Although the bricks are different, we think it actually adds to the character of the wall. But do the bricks look familiar? Okay, so maybe not to you, but they are the bricks that came from the wall that we removed between our kitchen and dining room.

Even before starting work on our rebuilding our garden wall, we knew we wouldn’t have enough bricks to finish the job, so using the bricks that we’re left over from knocking down our interior wall made perfect sense.

With autumn now well on its way, it’s great to have a wall that we know isn’t going to collapse at the first sign of a bit of frost. I’m pretty sure that if we’d waited another winter there wouldn’t have been many bricks left to save.

Cleaning around 800 bricks for hours on end has got to be one of the most boring but best money-saving jobs we’ve done in the house so far. Whilst I hated every minute of it, taking down the wall and cleaning the bricks ourselves saved us about £600 (which has gone towards another project that’s just been completed! I sooo can’t wait to share!)

Now that the wall is finished, we can’t help noticing all of the other projects that still need to be completed.

But to start with, we now need to find a new garden gate. We’ve been looking at both wooden gates and wrought iron ones. It’s really difficult to decide… what would you choose? Do you have any projects you’re trying to get finished before winter kicks in? Have you ever done any horrible building related jobs to save money?

You can catch up on our other wall related posts here:

Part 1 – Another Brick In The Wall

Part 2 –  Down It Goes

Part 3 – It’s Getting Small

Part 4 – A Bit Of A Confession About The Wall

Part 5 – Tearing Up The Tarmac