" Now, how do you layout a wall like this?"

" Well."

" How do you figure out the construction of it?"

" A rule of thumb that I like to use is I like to make the base of the wall as wide as it is high. So, for instance this wall is gonna be 3-foot high, so what I like to do is have the 3 foot or even a little bit wider wall at the base. As you can see it's slightly tapers up in the back and it's----"

" So that by the time you finish up here, all we'll really see is this much?"

" Yes."

" And the soil will come right back up to here including the sod?"

" Exactly."

" Gotcha. And then why is it angled on the front?"

" Well, what I do with that is that as you can see some of these stones also sits back. The theory behind that is that if you angle a wall back, when the ground heaves, it'll push this forward and then it will settle back where if you made it plumb and that heaves forward in time it would just eventually creep and fall over."

" Cree and fall over?"

" Yeah."

" We don't want that to happen. It looks so beautiful and it's such a hard thing to select the stones as you're going along to get them to look like that. Now Hector, what're you gonna put there next?"

" Well, I have this piece here which has a really nice face and it's----well, hopefully just fit right into place."

" So that the main consideration at this point is the face that you're gonna be looking at."

" Yes."

" And you don't worry about how it's gonna fit in behind the face?"

" Well, what----"

" Like that void back here."

" What I will do is I will find the piece that will fit into here and tie back into the stones in the back."

" Okay."

" So this one, what I'll do is to lay it up first and because this is a curved wall, I don't have any place to put strings."

" Yes."

" So a lot of this is all done by eyes----"

" Yeah."

" And what I'll do is basically stand down this face of the wall and I'll look to make sure that it runs in line with the rest of the stones."

" Right."

" Now, it isn't gonna be exactly perfect but neither the stones. So if there's a little bit of variation, it's gonna be okay."

" Sure."

" So the next stone that I'll choose will go to this height because if it sits up higher, which you don't wanna do. You don't wanna run in the courses. So this is stacking up on top of each other."

" Uhm."

" So in order to accommodate for the next stone, I've chosen this one which will probably sit into right here."

" Which will even up----"

" Yes."

" The level between this one and this one."

" So, your next stone will run right over to the next."

" Okay."

" Right over to here."

" Again you want that filled----"

" Yeah. And another thing you need to keep in mind is that the stones shouldn't wobble."

" Aha."

" You set a stone. You stick shims underneath this 'coz it does wobble."

" Uhm."

" By the end of the day, you should periodically be able to walk right down the stones that you've laid and not have them wobble underneath your feet. So, the next stone will sit right on top of here and let's see if we could find one for that spot."

" What about that one you just stepped on?"

" Okay. Uhm, actually I think this one might have a nice cap. When you're doing caps, you wanna have them be flat as they possibly can be. So that way when we stand back and look at your wall, they're running in an even line and they are running in a wavy pattern."

" Yeah, running in line and of course the sod will come right after this edge."

" Yes, it will."

" Another important thing when building a wall is you'll find stones that will have----what look like a nice face. This stone here has a beautiful face and why not use it in the front. I'll tell why. Because what will happen is the stone like this will probably fall over, what you'd rather do with this stone of this type is turn it this way, so it ties back into the wall."

" In any dry laid wall like this, you're gonna really depend on shims to keep things tight, right?"

" Yes, you are. One of the things with shimming is not every stone is perfect."

" Right, they're not all perfectly flat. Now, you can't use your string as a guide for the trace of this wall because its curve, but if you are using a sting as a guide for what, for the top?"

" Yes, what I'm doing is keeping----using the string as a guide to keep the top all in one even plain. So when we stand back and look at it, they're all nice and even. And what I did is I went around and then marked various spots on around the stonewall with my transit and what I'm doing is I'm leveling some here to here and running a string from this point to a finished point."

" So you can keep transferring over to the line as you stack them up."

" Yes, I do."

" Great."