How To Update The Appearance Of A Home with Retaining Walls

so today we're doing a simple remodeling project we're going to be updating the face of this house we have some timber walls that have probably been here for 15 or 20 years now although they're in very good condition it's just the look that outdates the this project and so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be removing this triple terraced retaining wall and installing a double terraced retaining wall the reason we're going to be cutting down one of the and removing and eliminating one whole terrace is simply because it's not needed and it will eliminate a little bit of the expense of the overall budget so those this bottom wall that you see right here this is going to be eliminated entirely and then the soil is actually going to be graded down to the curb line you can actually see where the water inlet pipe sticks out of the ground by about 18 inches that's where somebody had came in before and built the retaining wall where the grate used to be so we're going to revert it back to the original grades for the bottom terrace and then the upper two retaining walls are going to be approximately the same height but we're going to update it by using boulders so we're back at the site we have the retaining walls removed and we're going to do something that's a little bit unique to a job site we have to go actually take the excavator off from the site and harvest our own stones for this job normally what we would like to do is just call and place an order and have the boulders delivered we would typically just give out the sizes that we want the quantity of each size that we want and then hope and pray that we would get the right stone brought out to our site but because this is a smaller job site and this is one of those high-end one of those sites that are going to get a lot of notoriety and a lot of visibility and it's basically a remodeling job and we really want to do things the right way we're going to actually go out and individually pick up the stones for this project we're going to be using a modular type of design for the boulder walls with a random stone thrown in we're going to achieve a flat face and a flat top on it to do that we can't have a regular size stones brought out we need some consistency and we need to have the control to be able to pick out each and every stone that's going to go into this project so the next thing we're going to be doing is loading that excavator up hauling it out to the aggregate pit mining our own stones for this site and then bringing it all back here and putting everything in place all right here we go we're going to load it up bring it out and mine our own stones for this project so that way we know exactly what we're getting and how they're going to be placed on the job site we'll see you at the aggregate so we're at the anger get we've hand selected the song specifically for this project what i want to show you is a comparison of stones now these stones are sized for the job that we're on but right behind us we've also selected stones for the next project we're going on which is a 2 000 square foot engineered boulder retaining wall we're just going to show you the difference what we're going to be dealing with on this next project is a 14 foot tall wall that has to be built to keep the house from sliding in too late so when we get into the larger projects we like to use larger stones and we set this up so that we have all of our stones ready to go these will be base stones on the next job but you can see that this stone would have absolutely no business being on the job that we're currently working on it's a little bit of a unique relationship we have that gives us the ability to actually come into the aggregate pit and personally select the stones the only way we could do this is by making arrangements well in advance that we've made an agreement that allows us to come in and do that that gives us the ability to make sure that whatever it is we're building we have the right materials for that specific job site so we're at the final stages of this project we've imported pulverize screen black dirt we've spread it hand raked it out and got it ready for the customer who's going to put their own seat or sod in place what i want to point out on this project is it's not a very big retaining wall and so it takes a certain amount of craftsmanship and skill to build a small retaining wall but to still make it so it's not busy when you're using smaller stones like these 12 and 18 inch stones it's easy for the wall to get overwhelming very quickly so what we'd like to do a little trick is we like to try to bring in a few bigger stones that breaks up the pattern we still have consistency throughout the wall but it's not repetitive over and over again to accomplish this we actually had to import about 15 extra tons of stones and hand picked through them by doing that we were able to get the best of the best and put them in place for this customer's retaining wall i think the results speak for themselves