How wide are the terraces?

Could you raise the wall on the lower terrace to the height of the next higher, to create a platform that would support the 8X10 foot shed?

My shed opens on the short end, so it could be placed on a terrace that is 9 feet wide.

The terraces vary in width.

• The leftmost/bottom terrace is 8 feet, dropping off 10ft via a cinderblock retaining wall into a creek. I do not want to build on this level because I don't know how well the wall can hold with the added weight of the auxiliary building so close to it.
• The middle terrace is also about 8 feet.
• The rightmost/top terrace is about 5 feet.

I wanted to use 7ft of the middle and 3ft of the top terraces for the shed.

The reason why I don't want to raise the entire storage shed to the same level as the top level is because my yard is at the same level as the bottom terrace, and I don't want to build a long ramp when a shorter one would suffice by building the storage unit and its door mostly on the middle terrace.

If I were to build on the bottommost terrace, how far away from the retaining wall would you recommend I set the storage shed back from? I live in the North West, so we get a lot of rain and despite the soil seeming to be packed well, may run off.

Thanks.

I pictured the terraces coming down toward the house, and not so high.

It would take more that you can offer to answer you question about the bottom most terrace, as it would depend on the under ground structure of the wall and the original structure of the slope itself. (My niece had a lot where there was one area that had a "terrace" that was one huge rock, if that had been walled in and dirt added to the top, that would be one thing, if it was a clay slope down to the creek that is something else entirely.)

Is your house high enough that you could build a walk-in-storage space under the house or other building?

Did you end up making this work? We've got the same issue, two terraces going up from the back yard. We want to build up so that the shed/woodshop opening is on the ground level with the rest of the yard.

In answer to how far away...the answer is how tall is the wall. This allows a weight cone under the footing of 45 degrees, such that the weight will not shear the mud. You may look up footings, and will see diagrams of the no dig zones below them. The no dig zones are to prevent collapse. The angle is 45 when you are same distance away as the wall is tall. A structurally sound wall will mitigate this, and engineers are called in in for load bearing design when the walls are higher than 4 feet, though I have seen smaller brick walls fall over.