How to Build a Boulder Retaining wall

of this house. And what's happening, the issue we have today is this entire porch and the decking behind it is sliding down this hill. This is going to be about a 16ft tall bouldered retaining wall we have to build. And what's happening is it's sliding into this lake that I'm standing out on a dock on right now. The plan we've worked on, we've set into motion about 6 months ago. I had an engineering firm come out here. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be building a retaining wall to tie in with the neighbor's retaining wall. Starting at this point, it's going to be 5 foot tall. And then as we go, we're going to raise this wall up to catch this porch to save this porch from sliding in. Then the wall is going to stay at that same height and wrap around and tie into the corner of this deck. To get down here, we've got to create a ramp. We've got to create a road so that we can get an excavator with a thumb down here. And as you look behind me right now, this is going to be our road in. We've got to build a second retaining wall just to hold up the road. Okay. So, you can see how he's got to go backwards to bring the the boulders down. Does he know you backed your excavator up? You better he'll look behind him. There he goes. Look at that. automatically. Look at that. Like he knows what he's doing. Like he's done it once or 73 times before. So these are pretty big base boulders. We do have fabric that we're going behind this wall. Not always. We don't always use fabric. We prefer to use fabric. We have to use fabric on sandy sites. Isn't that right, Tim? clay sites. It's questionable because a lot of times what happens is the silt from the clay will bind up in the fabric itself and then create hydrostatic pressure and cause blowouts or ruptures. But anytime we get a chance, we're going to use fabric behind it. Now, in this wall, we're actually using geog grid as well. You can see where he's got the grid laid out and that goes in horizontally every 2 feet and then we angle it up. We got the 33inch commercial Ram Xpacker. That's actually ours. We bought it from a rental store. But you can see that's how we get all the compaction behind the wall. So it's not just so soft soil going in place. And then you can see how he lays this out like a jigsaw puzzle. Now it looks like he's using a basket weave pattern on this job site. Any particular reason? Is the customer want that or no? No. Just what he's prefer. That's what's working. He can throw a random boulder in if you want. In fact, this would technically be considered a random boulder. This big bottom one here. Um, sometimes what he'll do is he'll put them up vertically just to break up the pattern a little bit. But I don't know. I think this is a pretty good looking retaining wall. It's going to keep that deck and the rest of the house from falling into the lake. So, looks like he's making some good progress, especially for the rains we've recently had. Um, and after this wall gets built up, then it's over to the other side and then we're out of here. What do you think, Tim? Two days. Yeah, two days. No problem. The grades are a little bit deceiving in this case. It's tough to tell, but we have about a 16 ft drop. Hence, that's why we're going to need a 16ft tall wall. What you're going to find is when this project is done, you're going to see a retaining wall that cuts through here and then it wraps up and then it wraps around and then it hooks into the corner of the deck up there, which allows us access to come straight down through the middle. But not just us. Permanently, the customer who has forever had no access to this lake with anything but what he could carry in his own two hands will no longer have steps. He's going to have a nice ramp that he could drive a boat down if he wanted to. He could um drive a lawn mower down here. He can do maintenance. He can gain access. So, we're going to crawl up this hill and I'm going to show you some of the equipment we're going to use to tackle this project. A job like this, 3, four weeks at minimum if you want to do it right. We got about 400 cubic yards of structural fill soil coming in. We've got about 2,000 square ft of Boulder engineered boulder retaining walls that we're going to be building on this site. Not just boulder walls, but boulder walls fortified with a 3.0 0 geog grid certified, stamped, gone through licensing, permitting, gone through all the requirements, surveying with the city and approved. Here's the machine we're going to use. It's nothing more than a daywoo 75, but the key component to build these walls the right way attachment, not the machine, but this part. But what happens is he can grab a boulder with this machine, pick it up, and as you can see, he can spin that baby 360°. So he can take a boulder and put it anywhere he wants it in place like a jigsaw puzzle. Without that attachment, you couldn't do a job like this. We're going to be using 4ft boulders as our base. when you're using a boulder that's big enough to sleep on. Okay, that puts it in perspective. These things are gigantic. We're going to be using threeft boulders as secondary courses and 2ft and 18in boulders for our tiptop course. You can't build a structural retaining wall using these smaller stone. This is not technically a landscaping job. This is a structural retaining wall. Those smaller stones, they're awesome for smaller projects. There's a time and a place when you get involved in a project like this where you're holding up a house. You got to have the right tools and you got to have the right materials and you got to have the right plan. You don't lick and stick. We've