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Fixing garden wall
Stephen Cornish
Posts: 72
Any tips on fixing a garden wall? Lots of loose stones on top portion so i removed them, pulled out roots, got rid of crumbling cement and excess earth. I've some ready mix cement but nothing is exactly clean and earth free in terms of fine particles on which to fix cement to. Do i wet the area? Wash it with water? Or just hope for best? Any tips?
I'll get a photo in here later hopefully ...
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Posts
photo:
I think copious amounts of cement will do the trick. But make your mix quite stiff so you can sculpt it.
Noooo, never use cement to Rebed stone, get yourself a bag of hydrated lime from a builders merchant, and make a mix 1 part lime to 6 parts building sand, make the mix quite stiff. You will find that it will take about a week to harden up, but that is quite normal. Cement should never be used on stone as it is too hard, and doesn't allow the stone to expand and contract, as it does depending on weather conditions.
Lime mix between the stones, agreed, but as a coping it's less weather resistant than cement. Either way there's a good chance it'll crack again (from the pic it looks like there was a cement or lime 'coping' - like a thick topping shaped into a curve - which has cracked, and then water and frost have opened it out and caused the damage). A better long term solution would be to repair the wall (with lime mortar) to a flat top and then use either flat stones or tiles laid (on a lime mortar bed) to a slope to shed the rain or curved copings of some sort to form a more weather resistant top to the wall. Depends on what else is around as to what would be best - slates or clay or concrete copings are all fairly easy to come by in builder's merchants.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Thanks everyone. Right now I'm looking to just repair the worst of the wall, rather than redo the top of the wall (which is probably the better option). I'll look for the lime option
Hang on ... do I have to buy hydrated lime to add to the cement which is of course added to the sand???????
No, just sand and lime,no cement at all.
Ohh, the lime works like cement then? I'd not heard of this lime stuff until yesterday