Having moved to a new house recently, we lost much of the infrastructure we had set up at our old one that was useful for our children to play with. One thing we lost was a swingset, which was supposed to just be the beginning of a playset anyway, so we decided to expand on that idea at the new place, since our kids are getting older and need more to play with. The timeliness of this project was especially good considering the isolation that's been necessary during the coronavirus outbreak. I began work on this about 2 weeks before social distancing was the norm here in the US. We decided to self-isolate due to what I foresaw as a poorly managed response to the spread and the fact that my wife is pregnant, and therefore in one of the high risk groups. This is one thing I did with the extra time it has given me.
Above was the site before I broke ground. As with our old location, this new one is sloped pretty much everywhere on the property. Swingsets and climbing structures need a level surface to be set on, so this necessitated a retaining wall to create a level surface. I had two options here. I could either carve out a spot in the hillside and built the retaining wall uphill of the leveled area, or I could build a freestanding wall downhill of the desired surface and bring in fill. Since the previous owner had dug up some dirt in the back of the property and left it in piles that wer still fairly loose and relatively easy to dig, I decided to bring in that fill instead of busting up the sod in the old location and mining into the clay soils by hand. Without any mechanized means of excavation, this seemed like the best choice.
For layout I drove this stake into the ground well uphill about center of where I wanted the level surface to be.
Another wooden stake was attached at the other end, but instead of driving that one into the ground, it was used to make a radius mark in the soil downhill of here. That radius then was referenced at each end to be the desired width and distance from the house for keeping the new structures squared to the existing one.
Here is the beginning of digging the foundation trench for the wall to key into. Retaining walls need to have one course of blocks below grade both as a foundation and as a way to keep the whole wall from puking out the bottom under the considerable pressure of the backfill above it.
Here's the mostly completed trench. Because of the almost constant rain we've had this winter season in North Carolina, the soil was moist and the digging was relatively quick and easy. In comparison the dry decomposed granite soil in our Southern California back yard was like digging in something that behaved like both concrete and clay at the same time.
The newly refurbished dump cart came in pretty handy for this project. Here it is hauling the initial course of blocks. When we moved here I found all of these scattered randomly in the woods. They look like leftover building materials for both the house and shop foundations that were just pushed into the woods with the previous owner's skidsteer loader. Since my retaining wall blocks were in short supply since they were also scavenged from other locations on this property, I put these ones underground. It doesn't really matter what they look like since they'll be fully buried.
This is the hardest part of building any retaining wall. The initial course of blocks needs to be leveled. Much of this leveling was done in the digging process with the 4-foot level, but since each block needs to be leveled to the next and there are imperfections in both the blocks and my working surface on the bottom, there was a lot of in-out of each block and more fine-tuned digging and refilling in the appropriate spots.
Getting to this point took several days of whatever spare time I had. My kids were helping me back fill and fill the voids in the blocks here. The rest of the wall building was fairly quick.
Getting to this point took me about half a day. As you can see, once the base is made, it's really just stacking blocks when you build the rest of a retaining wall. You do have to backfill a bit of dirt to keep everything from moving around, but other than that it's quite fast. You might also notice that there is a line about 2/5 of the way across where the blocks look different. This is because I had two different types of blocks to work with. I had to deal with this type of problem on another retaining wall I had built, so I made sure to avoid issues with one block overhanging another by putting the larger blocks underneath the smaller ones. It looks a little funny, but it gets the job done, and I didn't have to leave the property and risk bringing the virus into my household to get this result.
Well, that's it for this post, the next stage of this project was the backfill. This actually took me a couple of weeks because of the shear volume of soil that had to be moved. My next post will be about that, because I ran into some problems with my equipment while doing this. I hope you enjoyed, and until next time, Buzz On!
