Walls:
The lot slopes about 1' for every 10' north to south and about 1' for every 8' west to east. Consequently, we need many retaining walls to have the house sit well with yard spaces, gardens and patios. The bids I received for walls were very, very high. Concrete and rebar have gone up in price and putting up walls is a lot of work. So, I decided to do them myself.
I found steel reinforced
wall forms to
rent. They were great to work with. I used them to
build a
10' high wall running south from the house 12', then turning west,
parallel to the house for 16'. That was relatively easy,
though I
was worried about the pressure from the volume of concrete, 7
yards for that wall. I also built a wall along the sidewalk
running north to south starting at 6' high and dropping in steps down
to 2' high. This was challenging since I had the steps in the
wall drop down at angles according to the slope of the staircase.
The site map shows all of the walls that will eventually be built. I have built the blue walls and need to build the yellow soon. Now that I have those big ones out of the way I feel more confident about the doing rest. More soon on this.
