Old House Handyman: Daughter's 'Tetris' skills helpful during building of retaining wall

My daughters grew up playing a video game called Tetris, and we recently used the skills they learned from that game to build a wall.

The Wikipedia definition of the game is this: “In Tetris, players complete lines by moving differently shaped pieces (tetrominoes), which descend onto the playing field. The completed lines disappear and grant the player points, and the player can proceed to fill the vacated spaces. The game ends when the playing field is filled.”

Two weeks ago, Daughter No. 3 and I played Tetris with 200-pound sandstone blocks.

I should say that she played Tetris. I followed her directions and helped find, lift and carry — with the help of John Deere — the stones we needed to build a retaining wall at the entrance to our family farm.

It was, in a sense, a final Mother’s Day gift to my stepmom, who talked before her death by cancer two years ago about how nice the entrance would look with a retaining wall.

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My dad had similar thoughts, but for different reasons. He wanted a wall to help hold soil around the mighty oak tree next to the driveway. He calls it the Indian Tree, because it is one of the many oaks that Native Americans bent over and tied down with a leather thong to show the direction of a particular path.

The tree was among the earliest Ohio road signs. It marked the trail. It showed the way. It pointed toward the next stop on the path.

And it is very big, and very old. Dad says 200 years. Maybe older.

Seeking to preserve the oak tree

My daughter lives in the shadow of that tree. She watches and listens to the red-winged blackbirds, the piliated woodpeckers, the blue birds, the hawks and the American bald eagles that fly through or above its majestic crown. She wants to make sure it is there for generations to come.

So, she said that we needed to build the wall that her Grandma and Grandpa had talked about. And we needed to get it done before Grandpa got back to Ohio after his winter trip to Arizona.

He had told us he’d be home the first week of May. I told my daughter that we better count on him returning a week earlier, because it’s spring in Ohio, and no one who had experienced the beauty of this place at this time of year wants to miss it. And plus, the wedding of our Amish neighbor’s daughter was April 27, and I couldn’t imagine him missing that.

So, we raced.

We raced as quickly as a 62-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman can race while carrying 200-pound rocks.

We worked from a pile of stones that has been sitting in the corner of our pasture for 35 years. They had been the foundation stones put in place by my great-great-grandfather when he built the barn on our farm. When my dad hired a crew to levitate the barn and put a new foundation under it to save it from sliding down a significant slope, they unceremoniously hauled the stones to a corner of the pasture and dumped them in a heap.

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It's no small thing to paw through a pile of sandstones, each the size of a concrete block or two — but solid.

And we had to find just the right ones.

Finding the right stones to use

My daughter had done her research. She had read up on the best ways to build a dry (no mortar) sandstone wall. She had watched YouTube videos. She knew what she was looking for.

So we looked, and she rejected a lot of stones. Those she liked best often were beneath some other stones. Big ones. Heavy ones.

I did not complain (too much). I bent my 62-year-old legs to save my back — and I employed an ample pry bar — and I worked with her to lift and roll and move perfectly good stones to get to just the right stones. And she was not wrong. They were right, and good, and they ended up making a very fine wall.

I was grateful that the temperatures were in the 40s on the first day of wall-building. Snakes don’t move much when it’s that chilly, and I’m confident there are snakes in that pile of rocks. I know that poison ivy lives there. I ripped out plenty of it on the way to the perfect stones. I also still have a few spots of “poison,” as my Grandma Miller, matriarch of the family farm, called that evil weed.

We loaded the perfect stones into the John Deere tractor’s bucket and hauled them to the Indian Tree. One by one, trip after trip, we assembled the pieces she needed to play Tetris. With 200-pound stones.

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A few were in the “wrong” place and required repositioning. I said little and let the Tetris master work her magic. I listened and lifted (and groaned in perfect “old-man” fashion) as we built the wall.

It rained and snowed, rained and snowed, and the sun shined brightly at times, as we worked over a couple of weekends.

By the time Dad arrived home from Arizona, the wall was done, and my daughter had dumped loads of topsoil behind it, in which she had started to plant ferns and flowers that will hold the soil tight around the Indian Tree.

Happy Mother’s Day, Nola.

Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.

youroldhouse1@gmail.com

@youroldhouse

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Handyman: Moving large stones to build retaining wall a labor of love