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3 hours a day over 3 days
About $20 per linear foot for a 2-foot-high wall
Difficulty: Moderate
Digging and heavy lifting is required for prep, but the stones stack easily.
Take a scenic drive through the back roads of New England and you will inevitably spot some of the 240,000 miles of stone walls built by 19th-century farmers trying to delineate their land. You may not have a large plot to mark off, but your patios and flower beds are still deserving of a border, and one that doubles as a place to sit down will make your landscape all the more enjoyable. But no need to dig up the yard looking for rocks like the Yankee farmers had to. As This Old House senior technical editor Mark Powers shows here, a wall built from cast concrete blocks made to look like stone is just as beautiful and much easier to build—especially when your "planting season" is confined to the weekends.
