Retaining Wall - Guide to Materials and Design:

We live in a small city outside of Portland, Oregon where the terrain is rather steep and plenty of people have houses on hillsides. In our neighborhood you either have a slope in your front yard or backyard. In any event, retaining walls are commonplace and a necessary party of any landscaping. The amount of rain we get in the Pacific Northwest is plentiful enough that landslides and other loose impediments can be an issue. I recently looked into getting a retaining wall for my front yard that faces the street below us. We have a gradually sloping hillside that has trees on it, but I thought it would be nice to have a retaining wall down by the street and try to level off the front yard a bit. I'm not so concerned about a potential slide - it's more that I want an aesthetically nice front yard. Rock walls or even those done with materials like railroad ties can look great.

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Choosing the material for the retaining wall - When it comes to materials you can go with poured concrete, stone, brick, wood, or interlocking blocks. I see all types around the town I live in, so don't feel like you have to choose a particular style over another. We have a huge boulder retaining wall in our backyard - more like a gravity wall so that the soil won't erode along our back fence which separate our neighbors yard from ours. The rock boulders are large - the type you need a tractor to move - and they were all in place when we moved in so I don't know the actual cost of that. I do know that the sheet pile retaining wall we are looking to get in our front yard could cost over $5000 - we are going to use pressure treated wood, but the labor is a huge part of the price. Stone retaining walls are beautiful and you can do them with or without mortar. Poured concrete retaining walls are quite common in our neighborhood as an easy way to separate side yards. The sloping in our area forces home builders to setup walls in between yards to stop soil erosion. I have done smaller project with interlocking concrete stone blocks that I bought at Home Depot (DIY project). We built up the soil around a tree bed and did the same for a few shrubs in our backyard. It's important to start with a level surface or else the wall will never stand up straight and level. We had to deal with roots underneath our stone wall before we could even start piling them up. Anything over a few feet and you are probably looking at hiring a professional contractor to get the job done right.

Retaining Wall Installation:

You need to dig a trench so that you can burry the first blocks or wood. This gives it more stability. If you have a flat area to work with, then perhaps this is something you can take on. The more slope involved, the harder it is to get the wall going. Drainage is a huge consideration as you build the wall, you need water to be able to drain under, around, or through the wall so that it doesn't build up behind the wall and "push" on it. Often, hiring an engineer is the best way to start the project. Your city may even have building ordinances where you need to get a permit from the city to get things going. Structurally you want the wall to be sound and strong. Since my wall across the front of the street will stretch some 55 feet, I thought it would be too much work to take on the project myself, so hiring a professional crew was the solution. They can get it done in a few days time whereas it would have taken me weeks to finish. To get an idea of how a wall gets designed and constructed you can watch the video of a garden retaining wall being put in here:

Retaining Wall Cost:

The big question most homeowners have is - How Much Does a Retaining Wall Cost? The price is dependent on materials used (stone, brick, blocks, wood, etc.), the slope of the terrain, and how tall or wide the wall will be. The harder the access to the area you want the wall at the more work required to build it and get the stones or concrete in place. Cost is usually described by the terms "square face foot". The do it yourselfers who use the interlocking blocks are typically looking at $10 to $15 a square foot face. An example would be a wall that measures 3 feet high and is 25 feet wide - the cost would be at least $1000 and upwards of $1500 if you use higher quality blocks. Wood retaining walls cost from $20 to $25 a square face foot so for something with similar dimensions as described above you are looking at $1500 to $2000. The stone retaining walls are even more expensive on a cost per square face foot - $25 to $40. Mortar adds a bit more to the process, but keep in mind you can have stone walls built without mortar. Poured concrete, although you may think is cheap, tends to be the most expensive way to go on average. $3000 is not unheard of for a wall that measures 25' X 3'. We found postings in online forums for folks that paid upwards of $10000 for huge retaining walls. Get at least 3 estimates when doing the project as contractors tend to bid all over the board on these types of projects. We read where one homeowner had a range of $3500 to $12,500 in estimates for the same job.

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