White Rock Retaining Wall Project

We are in the dog days of summer, and we are pushing through the heat and severe thunderstorms as best we can! Although the weather hasn’t been ideal, we’ve been completing various planting, excavating, and hardscaping jobs. One of our larger jobs occurred at White Rock, which required us to install a retaining wall, along with regrading to divert the water that was running onto the homeowner’s driveway. The home sat below the roadway, and there was a steep bank that ran down too the driveway. The bank was so steep that there was no possible way to take a machine from the top of the road to the bottom of the driveway. The first order of business was to clear cut the bank in which we were working. It was an overgrown area consisting of smaller trees and briar patches. After this was completed, we started working on the drainage issue. First, we used a skid loader to remove all the soil that had washed onto the driveway. We needed to do this to help the excavation process for our retaining wall. We took this soil back to the top of the hill to regrade. While we were in the process of completing this, we removed an old headwall to swap it out with an inlet box. We installed the new inlet box and added a 20ft section of pipe so that the water would be directed differently. At the end of the pipe, we added rocks to create a rock bed for the water flowing through the pipe. After this was all set up, we fine graded the slope and put down netting to help stabilize the slope. Since the top portion was stabilized, we started excavating for the retaining wall. The driveway was all uphill, so we had to work in small sections at a time. Once we had a section dug, we used our 2a modified for the base of the wall. Once this was evenly spread at approximately 6 inches thick, we ran our plate tamper to meet the appropriate compaction. Following this, we added a thin layer of stone dust to set the blocks. In most instances, we only could run 4-5 block until we had to step up, due to the slope of the driveway. In total, we had about 20 steps in the wall. The highest point of the wall was about 7 ft. high. After we were done setting the wall block, we glued the caps to make everything flow nicely. Lastly, we paved a little section between the existing driveway and our new retaining wall. Take a look at some of the pictures below.