More wall

Here is a bit more of the garden wall that my wife and her mother have been labouring over. The odd looking patch in the middle is stable but horrible so they've been doing the bits that needed work first, and will come back to this section later on. It's very cheap and easy to do yourself, but painfully slow so you need to spend weeks to do even small sections like this.

The really slow work is when some idiot has used Portland cement which breaks the stones or where the lime has been allowed to wash away and the the stones allowed to slump - in both cases you need to carefully remove the stones, and then reinsert them and refill the void that has often formed between the two leaves of stone. Only when you've rebuilt the wall can you repoint it.

If it's just repointing then that's actually quite quick, as you just have to hack out the old lime mortar and put in fresh. Lime is quite soft so you can take it out with a cold chisel and hammer, and when it's really soft you can usually brush it out with a power washer! As you can tell from the above paragraph that's not been the case mostly...!