You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs...

image from Magnific.com

This particular "omelette", of course, being our pesky garden wall 😏

George began the task of dismantling the stones, cleaning and saving as much as possible to be used in the rebuild, including all the lovely, hand-shaped, beautifully weathered coping stones.

A lot of the stones were in good enough condition to be re-used but not all of them, unfortunately.

The original wall had been built straight onto the ground, with no foundation.  These two big pieces of granite were a tad too much for George to move far, so he just left them in situ!

He was as surprised as we were to find that the "good" soil went all the way down.  Those weird little things hanging down, by the way, are the pins we used to hold the weed membrane in place 😄

We had quite the pile of demolished wall sitting in the shared driveway for some time.  Although the drive isn't suitable for vehicles to pass along it, we are nevertheless very lucky that our neighbour is so understanding 😊

George numbered all the coping stones, putting them to one side to be placed back on the rebuilt wall in due course.  Looking at the section of wall which wasn't being rebuilt, you can see that there was a little more going on there than had first been apparent, which meant an addition to the remedial work was going to be needed 😳

It was a relief to see the concrete foundation in place so that the rebuild could get underway.  I must confess that I found this stage of the proceedings as worrying as discovering the dire state of the wall in the first place.  I was very concerned that the garden would simply collapse with no wall to support it!  George reassured me that the soil was well enough compacted not to move but I admit that I wasn't totally convinced, even though he obviously knows what he's talking about ~ and you'll no doubt be pleased to hear that he was of course perfectly correct😄