How to Build a Retaining Block Wall

[Music] hi david o'dell here with odell complete concrete this is our first day on the job site we're going to be doing a retaining wall it's a property line retaining wall you can see here's the old wall and it's leaning it's got some cracks in it it's hollow so we're going to remove this wall and the footing if there is a footing and here's some of the tools we'll be using to remove the wall we also have the plate compactor made by tomahawk we're gonna use that to compact the new um area for the new footing the new retaining wall will probably be about one block higher than what we see here so i want to get the new blocks above that grade on the high side so as we start knocking it down we can we can see why it was leaning and why the wall was failing to begin with although it did last quite some time i mean that wall's probably been there for at least 60 years so that's pretty good i mean who knows when the soil went in behind it that may came in a lot later it may have been a freestanding wall at one point with a slope on the other side for that yard but that's most likely the dirt built up over the years but as a freestanding wallet did pretty well but once you hit it with a load of dirt it started coming apart quickly so our vertical rebar that they have in there is number three rebar and there's not very many much of as you can see i see two pieces there they're about four feet apart so that's the only blocks that had grout in them was where the vertical rebar was and that was at about three or four feet apart no horizontal bar no no bond beam another another reason it failed on the bottom course of that existing block while they left all the bottom head joints of the block open for weep holes so the water would go through there without building up pressure behind the wall and that's always a good idea the basic idea they had on this was pretty good they just cut a lot of corners i would say when they put it in here now this is going to come out this whole fence gate and it was all redwood that's all original gate some real clear redwood really hard to find that quality wood anymore actually the reason we're taking that uh fence out and the gate because we're going to put a column here and then we're going to hang a new gate at some point we won't be doing the gate but we will be doing the column a 12 by 12 6 foot high column on the end also we're going to do a column on on the entrance end of the wall possibly put a lantern up there may run some low voltage but you can see at the top of the hill the footing was really meager it was probably eight inches thick max so that came out really nicely and easily but as we got down here a little bit lower the concrete got to about a foot thick almost i'm just gonna over cut this wall that way i have some space to get behind the new wall um there's there's the footing coming out right now but the reason i'm over cutting it is so i can get some waterproofing behind the new wall and that's why i need that space and then i'll just backfill after the walls cured out a lot of roots we ran into newer um all of that ivy these are the roots from the ivy that was growing in there so now i'm just scooping out i'm taking some nice big scoops and going down even further below where the old footing was because we're going to make it wider and deeper we're going to go about 14 inches deep of concrete maybe 18 right in that ballpark and then about 2 feet wide and then on the footing design we're gonna run a 583 bar uh two number fives the long way and then for the verticals we'll run number fours every 32 inches and then on the top block we're going to run a bond beam and that's going to get a number for rebar in it as well horizontally tying all the verts and horizontals top and bottom together we found an old pipe up there we don't know what it was no idea but it was a steel pipe really good quality steel because there's really not much rust on it which is another thing that's hard to find actually good steel pipe that doesn't rust here we are at the dump just getting rid of some debris the block i actually took to the recycling center and they've recycled crush it make road base out of it mix it with the concrete asphalt but here's what we have that getting back to that pipe yeah that pipe was in good shape i don't know what's in it but we didn't break it fortunately so i don't need to find out what what's in it it's probably an old abandon in this area where we're at there's a lot of old oil derricks and stuff and they abandoned the pipes underground most likely it's an old um from an old rig oil well rig now we're just establishing some gray we have a lot of slope on the side of this so we're gonna have a lot of step downs in the footing as well as the top of the block there's the couple number fives we're gonna those are pretty much in place right now real close there's not a lot of uh room in there you can't really go wrong when you throw them in they kind of land where they go now that the horizontals are tied in place end and i'm just marking the rebar i have a permanent pin marker the really wide ones so you can really see the mark so i just laid out every 32 all the way down now i'm tying the rebar i put some tails on that i have a little rebar bender going there in the background cut and bend one tool we're putting about six inch tails on these and that's going to go underneath the horizontal we're going to alternate directions on the tails now instead of hanging a board and tying off the rebar to that i'm just going to tie the rebar together on an angle then when the second goes in there i'll bust the tie wire from the top and then plumb up the verts we're looking at two pallets of block here that's what this calls for to finish this project 16 inch long eight inch wide eight inch high block it's gonna be solid grouted so that line represents the inside face of the block now on the rebar here you can see i'm just pulling it up as the concrete goes in now the verticals will still stay in the right position because the horizontal is not moving and the verticals are tied to the horizontal so all i have to do is untie that top tie off of those angle bars and then plumb them up and it's on the money the important thing to remember when you're putting in the footing is that whatever grade their footings at has to be lower than you know your final product like if you're going to pour a driveway over if you're going to landscape over it so we have to take that into consideration the top of driveway elevation in case that driveway gets wider which most likely it will in the near future and we're going to pour the client right on top of the footing without having to deal with a footing that's uh in the way here's the mix it's a real nice looking one real stiff this is a little drone footage also right now we have a string line tied off and that string lights in level and what we ended up doing was just measure down from that line in eight inch increments and adjust the concrete in the steps that we need here's a little you can see some of those step downs there's one there so that's all that's probably all 32 and then it jumps up to 24 and so on here's the column block that'll go in there first that's a 12 by 12 by 8 high string lines are all in so far so good on the vertical rebar placement every now and then you'll run into a vertical that has to be shifted that's when a hickey bar comes in handy because you can double bend it and make it come up in the right place although we didn't have a hickey bar so we were fortunate that they all lined up now as this concrete dries a little bit more right now the idea of throwing the dirt over that footing is to try to get it to go off because we're going to be working and walking along that concrete and as you walk along the footing it moves the block when it's wet when you're doing everything same day so you throw a little dirt over it and then uh sucks the moisture out of there cures it up a little quicker then um also we're flattening out at the same time so when we walk through there it's a lot easier than walking over bumps and rocks and hills and stuff inevitably what we'll do as the concrete cures out we'll even scrape down a little bit more just to make sure that we are lower than finish elevation as you can see that's our last block right there and that's the open bond beam on top the cap on this block is just going to get i'm just going to round it off with some mortar when i go to grout i'll sh i'll use the grout actually to get kind of a contour in that cap that way when i throw the mortar over the top it's a very thin coat if you go thick on the mortar on your cap it's going to crack up on you so you kind of do everything with the concrete mix and just touch up with some order little drone action here that particular that's a manuel there and uh he brought him a hell he brought himself a helper i've actually known him for about uh 30 years he's we've kind of started pretty young he's pretty good at it at this point you could say so basically what we did is i'm just buttering up the block ends and then i'm hitting um running uh the rail on on the block and then he's just sticking them on there we will be running a little bit of conduit in this end column um before we grout we're going to run a three quarter with a nice long sweeps and eventually some low voltage coming up now here's the grout day we calculated this to be about two yards of grout here and i guess we didn't have anything left when the truck was because i ordered two and we used it all as you can see there i'm throwing the concrete on the top to create that contour in the cap so all these horizontal rebars you see actually jab into the columns as well plus we're locked in at the bottom at the bottom end foundation there was existing two pieces of existing rebar that came out of the original foundation where we started at and we left those stubbed out so we tied in the foundation as well and then horizontals come right into the column but here's how i'm shaping up the concrete to start with they actually make some metal round tools for this but i just like doing it by hand i found with those tools when you end up using those you always get a lot of excess running down the outsides of the walls when you use your hand um you can do keep it all everything a lot cleaner well that caution tape you see hanging on my neck i'm gonna actually use that um just to smooth off the top you'll see that in a minute here it works nice on ball nose steps and stuff like that as well they do make tools for that too but i just you know use the basic stuff whatever is on hand there i just pulled the caution tape across the top and that kind of smooths it out and gives it a nice shape now all we have to do is let it dry a little bit and then we'll just hit it with a damp sponge to really give it that nice detail so there's the sponge work the long term plan for the neighbor is um leveling that out and then parking an rv on the high side and be no no problem at all for this particular wall right now we've already waterproofed it we've left the bottom weep holes open so and this is what it looks like when it's all done magnificent oh there's that conduit there's the little stub out we're just gonna run some low voltage there put a little light on top the thing about the waterproofing is we we brought it up to the dirt level so the top back of those blocks they don't have the waterproofing because they're above grade that's kind of crucial because it wouldn't look that great if it came up above so so i figure if the last wall lasted 60 years this one should last about 120. anyway thank you for watching hope you enjoy the video make sure you like share and subscribe and hit the notification bell to get notified when we upload the next video have a good one

Channel: Odell Complete Concrete

Views: 392,371

Rating: 4.8709173 out of 5

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Id: OgQDwchOrnY

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021