Building a retaining wall

20 years ago

Well a few weeks ago, I ordered my stone and spent two weekends ago digging my trench for the base stone. My wall is going to be approximately 90 feet long and a foot and a half high. I have elevation changes over the length of my wall that are going to require some stepping in the wall.

The stone was delivered last Monday, all 14.5 tons of it... I didn't want to take a chance on having the truck rip up my drive way, so I had it all dumped up at the street. My wife and I spent about 8 hours over the weekend moving all the stone down to the build site.

You can see pictures

here

We are going to use the boulders that you see to break up the wall and to use as part of the elevation changes. We are going to backfill and eventually get flowering groundcover to fill in the area from the top of the hill down to the wall.

Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pictures on webshots

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Comments (9)

jugglerguy
20 years ago
That looks like a fun project! Keep us posted on your progress.
tabber174
Original Author
20 years ago
Well I got started on building the wall this weekend. My brother helped me place all the boulders in place and I built one of the wall sections.

You can see the pictures thru the link below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Retaining Wall pictures
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gottagarden
20 years ago
Looks like you have a great start!

There are lots of posts here on retaining walls. One thing I read (and did) was to use landscape fabric behind the stone. This is to stop frost heave from pushing the dirt through the stones, causing shift. Not sure if its really true, but it's cheap enough.
tabber174
Original Author
20 years ago
Well lost all day Saturday due to rain, but got back after it today.

It is coming along a lot quicker than I expected. My thought on that is that I have a very large selection of rocks to work with so I don't have to spend a lot of time searching for the next one.

Here is a link that might be useful: Album from this weekend
melsmom_hv
20 years ago
Congratulations on your progress, Tabber. That wall is really adding visual interest to the property.
gottagarden
20 years ago
Very, very nice! You're working quite quickly for such a big project. Liked seeing your photos.
sandykk
20 years ago
Great job!! Looks like all your hard work paid off, tured out really nice. I feel for your back ;-) Ours felt the same way.
tabber174
Original Author
19 years ago
No real updates to report on other than have finished the wall except for putting on what I'm calling the cap stones. All they are are the really large pieces of wall stone that I separated when moving all the stone down from the street. Sometime in late March I'll order the dirt for the fill and go from there. We are planning on placing a big order with Blue Stone Perenials to fill in the garden. Now I have to figure out what to do with all the left over rock. I'm sure I'll figure something out.
tabber174
Original Author
19 years ago
Well progress is still being made. I actually haven't worked on the retaining wall for about two months now as I've started a walkways project instead of finishing the retaining wall project. Here are the latest pictures of the retaining wall.

Here is a link that might be useful: May 2007 retaining wall pics