How to Build a Retaining Wall - Step by Step

hey today's video we are talking about retaining walls we're not just talking about like high-tech high-end like holding back a wall of mud retaining walls we're talking about a simple DIY retaining wall you can do at home with just basic garden tools and a little bit of sweat equity okay so here's the deal there are seven steps to build a retaining wall and is very key you don't miss any of these steps because they all have a specific function so in this video I'm going to go through all the steps all the details a lot of cheats and how you can get a great-looking retaining wall and a relatively low cost and why it's so important so first of all let's talk about why we need a retaining wall so what I've got here behind me is the deck it's attached to the house it's on footings but the footings are being compromised and it's slowly sinking because the retaining wall that's here right now it's falling over now generally these old railway logs the railway ties they do a decent job of holding back dirt but they're not designed for the kind of climate that we live in which is freeze-thaw right so every year snow and water builds up in here and then we'll get a day where it'll melt a little bit and it'll freeze again what happens is that ice ends up pushing the wall over and this is overtime so we're probably talking about 20-25 years that this has been here but because this wall is only holding back dirt and it has no drainage behind it all right it has no ability to remove that water when it thaws out before it freezes again we have a major issue now we're going to be building a wall that's built for our kind of climate and it's built for all kinds of climate to be honest with you whether you live in the south or the north or anywhere in between lots of water a little bit of water this is a perfect system for you so not to worry this is not climate sensitive information today is a one-stop shop fit for everybody kind of solution now of course before you build a wall you have to understand that your foundation is very important so you want to dig past the soil and you want to get down past the black earth to your basic clay or your dirt that's underneath and the reason for that is the first course of brick what you want that underneath the ground okay and that'll be very important to help make sure that you've got a stable solid base that you're building your wall on all right so step one is to dig a hole all right we're going to be doing is putting GA which is this mix of stay sand and stone we're gonna be putting that in the trough you want to dig your hole with a flat bottomed shovel this flat bottom shovel allows me to scrape the bottom flat and the sides if you disturb the dirt and your digging with a spade and you're lifting it out you got a bunch of loose dirt left you've got to pack the dirt in if you use a flat bottomed shovel you don't have to pack the dirt and you can save yourself a whole step so you can see disturbed soil needs to be packed so if I'm digging like this and I'm making a big mess with the shovel then I dig that out I've gotten a bunch of disturbed soil left but if I take the flat bottom shovel okay and I simply carve out my edge then I've got a nice flat surface for my geotextile and my stone to sit on and that makes it a lot easier for me to set my wall and I don't have to pack the dirt now the key to remember when you're digging your ditch is that you have to have a space wide enough for your retaining wall and the weeping tile which is a four inch round pipe plastic tubing with a sock on it that goes on the other side of the lower layer so if you're gonna go 12 to 16 inches you should be fine next we put in our geotextile now this is landscape cloth but remember not all landscape cloth is equal there are about six different grades that I've seen on the marketplace some are very very thin I don't know what the point is other than just to sell people garbage so they have to come back next year and buy more but this stuff here is super thick it's like a plastic burlap sack material and you can buy this on fifty or hundred foot rolls three foot four foot six foot all depends on your needs ok so shop around make sure you're buying the product that's right for you but the more you invest in your geotextile the better quality product you have now you'll see this rained overnight and my stone and sand mix is holding all the water it's pretty dry underneath that all right that's really important this is like a water barrier okay and so all the water that collects from the rain is going to come down it's going to hit this tarp it's going to stop there and it's going to collect in the weeping tile behind that sock very very key that is a water diversion system so now all the water around the whole building is going to come down here and head to my ditch and is going to be removed from behind the wall and that'll preserve the integrity of this wall down the road from freezing and thawing cycles and erosion which is so important now I've seen a lot of people build these walls with really tiny levels resist the temptation yeah a wall is a really long thing and you should use a long level okay so when I put my level in this dirt over six feet I'm finding I'm really out of level and that's fine remember I want where my my stone goes to be level but behind it it can be on that slope that's not going to be a big concern so what I want to do with my first course is I want to get my first three bricks level I just got too much stone here okay there we go let's find out so that would be a boat there I'm just gotten a couple shovels of dirt and I'm gonna use the hand tamper now this stool here I think I picked these up for about thirty bucks when you're doing a retaining wall you don't need to go out and rent expensive equipment to pack it all in you'll see lots of videos where they buy these little jumpers the reality is the average man can grab this and put just as much pressure on that ground as that jumper does it's a whole lot of nothing if you ask me how it might be a little bit easier if you're doing hundreds and hundreds of feet every day but if it's a once in a while project doing a hand tape will work fine this ski is mix the sand and the stone with a little bit of water before you pack it and you'll be fine now today is incredibly windy so I'm gonna hide in the trench as much as possible so you can hear okay so here's the deal you take your flat bottomed shovel and you just take the top off of that stone dust okay and you rake it flat set your level double-check that you're in the right night kind of neighborhood yeah we're getting closer we're gonna pack it still a little bit off on that end here we go now just a quick word of warning the first row is the most important of the entire project it's also going to take about 75% of your time don't be afraid to check and recheck and level and pound and check and recheck and level and pound you want this to be perfect because once you put the stone on there's very little bit of movement that you can do to get it in position so when in doubt always pack it a little bit higher than you need if you need to you can always pick up the stone remove the stone dust and the GA and then you can set it again but you want to have it perfectly level because everything else would follow suit and if you have any kind of bowing you're gonna have gaps in your wall and it's gonna look horrific just to take a look at this material this is a concrete paver it's basically just a concrete block and it's designed to have kind of a rustic look chiseled corners it's got dimples and divots which is really good for us because there are two kinds of stone there's a smooth pore and there's a rough pore okay the rough pore you can put the adhesive to go from layer to layer and you don't have to do any additional work if you're getting a smooth pour laura chiseled stone you've got to actually take your quick cut and put lines in it so that when you put your adhesive on it's got something to grab to between the stone layers so if you can imagine stone stone totally smooth the adhesive has nothing to grab onto so you put that marks in there and then the glue is growing down and growing up and that's where you get your strength in this scenario we just set the brick you can put a stake on each end and put on a string so you got a straight line okay but you want to make sure that that stone is flat if it when you hit it if the corners pop up lift it up and throw a little bit dust under there okay now what we're gonna do is we're gonna put in four or five of these things and then confirm the level all right right there I already know I have a problem all right the whole back end is just way too low so I put in a little bit extra stone dust now I'm going to pound it flat now like that let's put this on and see how we do how we're doing all right so here we got five stones a six foot level and we're in between the two lines which means relatively speaking construction terms is level but if you want to make it perfect this is your opportunity to pick up a couple of stones add a little more dust underneath and reset it until it's absolutely perfect you only get to do this once so take the time okay whenever you're moving your pavers lift them all straight up and down this one and this one and this one all need a little extra love now if you take your level and you go corner to corner like that and if it's not level you know your stones are on an angle okay so we're level this way but front to back we got to fix up the back line alright so just a quick recap because I'm not very good at going step one step two step one is dig your trench flat bottom hole save you a lot of time step two put in your geotextile wrap it in a u-shape for the hole hole step three add your GA level it off the best you can all right step four is first course of stone all right now there's only three stages left here which is awesome the next step we'll call step five is the second course and all the consequent courses it's all the same installation now what we're going to be using here is an adhesive to bond these stones together like I said the surface is very rough so they'll grab really well I want to just make this point don't watch this video and go well I'm going to glue the block together I don't need drainage bad idea this adhesive is really designed to bomb the stone together so that during the process of backfilling and packing behind it doesn't move the wall that's it is what this is designed to do if you don't have your drainage in place frost is still going to destroy your wall I don't care how much of this glue you use is not designed to overpower frost trust me frost can lift a freighter out of the harbor it can sure as hell move your retaining wall now let's get this in here by the way this is a construction adhesive 600 series this is not PL premium or ultra premium it's just the 600 this stuff is six bucks a tube versus ten bucks a tube for the ultra it's not necessary to buy the best stuff on the market this will do the job all right and if you want to learn all the differences about one caulking to the next and different adhesives then click the card up here we did a whole video and explaining all of different selections that are available to you always use the right product for the job you'll save a lot of money and you'll save a lot of frustration our first course of stone is designed to be flush or lower that just lower than the grass when we're done we're gonna probably put a little bit of soil in here and clean this all up nice so we're gonna call this flush with the ground the second course okay I'm gonna just offset this just a little bit and I'm just gonna put a couple of runs of the adhesive on there now no one's gonna see the first course when we're all done so I'm gonna just offset a little bit it's to stagger my joint and I'm gonna go flush on the surface okay and we want to go straight down okay you don't want to set it and slide it over you want to keep that whole bead of adhesive in one location let it squeeze into all the pores of the stone that's how it's going to bond best you know if you have a nasty chunk make sure it's on the backside you don't want all the broken quarters showing oh okay beautiful one of the ways that you can save a lot of money is if you build your wall a little bit longer because then you can step it down and you don't have to be doing all the cuts yeah my scenario here is really simple I'm actually building my wall a little bit lower than the dirt level that's three feet away and I'm gonna be back filling on a slope and then slow grading it over here as well and coming back with grass the reason for that is if you have natural drainage running off the side of the hill it doesn't put as much of a demand on the weeping tile system and that's key so why you got to do put your adhesive and go with a half stone installation right here and now you can step it all the way up and grade your Hill now these stones are going to be visible so getting your half mark is important you can always get a measuring tape and a pencil if you need to but I've put in enough tile in my life I know what half looks like there we go spray it down on the glue now for every subsequent course of this stone wall I'm gonna suggest you go with about a half an inch back now if you give yourself a half inch setback on every course what you're gonna do is you're gonna buy yourself some mercy that's what I mean if your wall isn't perfectly straight you can make up for that overtime by having a little bit of an adjustment curve back here all right everything is chiseled it's very organic and it's very raw and it's not incredibly linear so that you've got lots of working room if you try to keep your wall flush and you don't have a straight line it's gonna really scream because you're gonna have coming and going okay so setting it back a little bit just gonna buy you a little bit of mercy it really gives you nothing in the way of strength but it is a cool look to see a little bit of texture on the wall when you're all finished one of the reasons we started our dance solo is because we're on a hill we're gonna have what's called stepping up so I put my brick here now I'm too high I don't want to dig out all the gi underneath that because that's my base so what we do here instead is we're gonna fill up this area with with the crushed stone and pack it till it's flush with this dump yeah it's gonna take a little bit of working okay now we're gonna see this okay we're obviously too high that's where the rubber mallet comes in because we can just keep pounding this until we vibrate and move everything underneath it to where we want it note don't try to do this with a steel hammer you'll just destroy your stone remember I said about giving yourself a half inch back if you do that you can continue to use the level on every course of stone you've got contact no you see I'm perfectly level and these two are actually a little low so what I'll put this on the original course I'm perfectly level but from here over I'm actually low you see that it doesn't mean that I have to beat the middle down because then we'll actually do is I'll have it a level and then a bowl so okay there we go perfect now remember earlier when I said that 75% was the first course I wasn't joking because you can do this all day long right half brick you just start slapping them in place remember push that half back a little bit about half an inch give yourself the mercy set and drop there's nothing easier than this once you get started if you start perfect you can build like you're on fire now let's get on to the next step which is the water divergent system very crucial there are two major components okay there you go for a lot of you you might not be familiar with what the concept of weeping tile is basically it's a pipe that moves water around the foundation of the home back in a long time ago they used to use clay tiles kind of like the roof and they would build a system for water to be diverted to the city now we use a corrugated plastic tubing that's got perforations in it and we put this fine fabric sock over top of it so that it'll filter out the dirt so they don't get sediment building up inside the pipe which it means we don't want dirt around the weeping tile okay so we're doing everything we can to keep the dirt away that is why you're gonna end up using this 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch clear stone okay this looks a lot more different than the GA it doesn't have the dust in it so what we're gonna do is we're gonna cover our weeping tile and this product alright and that is what we're going to use to bury our weep inside so let's just do a recap of what it looks like okay we've got a hole we've got geotextile and this is to keep plants and that sort of thing growing up in the system because plants will integrate into the weeping tile and cause it to clog we also have a base layer of GA underneath which is used as our leveling stone we have our below ground surface base layer and then our first course that your visible from the outside and then we're stepping up the courses recessing it back using the right 600 adhesive then we're gonna cover our weeping tile in our clear stone and once you've got about three to four inches of clear stone on top of that then you can go back with dirt piece of cake so we can finish off the rest of this hole filling it in with the doing with a GA okay we don't actually have to use soil the plan is we're gonna pop this off we're gonna have all that GA fill in here it's great for drainage get all that water down it clear so help to filter it the cloth will help to filter it the water will run no problem we'll never have a problem with freezing this retaining wall will be here a hundred years from now all right the bigger the project the bigger the orders you can get you can get everything from 20 18 yards on it on a try actual truck right down to individual bags that are 30 kilos each so it all depends so you might have to do a calculation on how much aggregate you need and for doing that you can actually go online Google has some great resources so you can figure out how much of the different kind of stone you need piece of cake so one of the last skills you're gonna need to know if you're building a retaining wall if you want it to turn any kind of corner okay is how to cut your corners because you can't just cut all your stone and have this one gap running all the way to the top because that'll allow a lot of water in there and in our climate allowing water to build up means you're gonna get Frost and it'll start peeling apart over time so overlaying your joints is essential to reducing the amount of water you let in the cracks and the gaps so that you don't end up with a frost problem so we have our two courses of wall coming down we're coming to our intersection we're going to be changing direction and it's a 45 degree turn whenever you got a 45 to return traditional carpentry you would cut both pieces of material at twenty two and a half you add it together it gets your 45 degrees when you're working with a stone on a retaining wall what you want to do is you want to cut one piece 45 degrees and here's why you can alternate this way see this would be cut at 45 and your next piece of stone will actually come right up to it like this on that line okay BAM and we said well if we can cut the bottom piece 45 degrees the next one to lay in full and then for the second course this wouldn't be cut 45 degrees and the miss stone will be full and they'll actually be alternating all the way up the corner so we're going to show you how to use the quick cut because this is one of these tools you can use wet or dry and it's a quick simple rental they run about thirty bucks a day so if you can organize your your your wall to the point where you're ready to do all your cuts one quick rental and you can have a professional-looking job and you can have yourself so what we've got is that we've got our first two courses of stone here and what I've done is I've laid this block where my corner is gonna be okay now what I want to do is I want to have full stones at the corner so that I'm measuring the interlocking system here so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this block and take ad this gap here and gonna cut two stones to fill this hole I don't like putting small stones in they always look cruddy and so it's kind of like in tile if you're gonna have a sliver you're better to take another full piece off and cut them both and make it a little bit more manageable that's 14 and a quarter I've got my first stone marked at 7 I need one stone that I can use to set up and I will set my cut line just a little off-center we're gonna use the quick cut and cut through that here we go we're in business anybody make sure you're holding your material straight there are most feed and store your stone once we got a line to fall over her up [Music] that makes a pretty nice cut [Music] now we'll take our two seven inch pieces and put them in the hole [Applause] it's time to cut this one [Music] [Music] I want to make sure you cut that nice and smooth because you want to have a nice tight joint here we go now you can see now you're going to measure from the front of the stone to the joint we're gonna go five inches this one is going to be a straight cut and the leftover of that stone we're gonna cut with the 45 so that we're alternating our joint there we go we'll get both cuts out of the same rock this way all right so mostly you know I'm at safety second kind of guy but honestly putting that in an angle without proper footwear and safety equipment is nuts so kind of like that that's perfectly safe [Music] here we go that's that row right we still need our glue we're on a corner do that as well gets rid of the ability for water to work his way back down the block now you see the pattern here the next block that goes on here won't be this one not in a 45 and then the next one will be like that again and so you're always staggering your joints and you're getting a really good contact that's money in the back so guys quick word of warning when you're renting your equipment the blades and in most cases don't come with us off so if you don't own a blade you have to purchase one or you can actually rent the blade depending on the place the place where I got this they were selling blades I know home depot rent them now of course you can use these wet or dry if you're just doing a few cuts like I am outside and there's a nice breeze dry it's fine a little bit of dust isn't gonna kill you but if you're gonna be working with us all day long cutting a patio stone or something then hook up the hose do yourself a favor and keep the dust down as far as safety gear you know lots of guys on YouTube are showing you how to use your safety gear you go ahead and use it if you need it I've been working with high power tools spending five thousand rotations a minute all my life I'm not intimidated by the least and I know how to handle them so this is why I like production first safety second anyway um that's pretty much all the information I got for retaining wall one brick at a time be happy with what you set if you're not happy fix it don't move forward remember the greatest contractor at any site is you alright all you need to know is the right tools the right process the right materials and then 90% of the job is integrity and nobody gives a darn about your home as much as you do and that is half the battle so if you want to see the other project when working on recently click the link up here this is our most recent projects videos and it'll get you up to speed with what's going on in our channel we've got a lot of great exterior projects going on most importantly everything we're showing you right now are ways that you can earn huge money renovating your home right I'll see you soon

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 651,355

Rating: 4.856626 out of 5

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, retaining wall, diy, how to build a retaining wall, diy retaining wall, landscaping, retaining wall installation, retaining wall ideas, retaining wall design, how to build retaining wall, retaining walls, do it yourself, retaining wall construction, build retaining wall, build a retaining wall, retaining wall blocks, how to, retaining wall drain, retaining wall steps, how to dig for a retaining wall, landscape wall blocks

Id: hk0QwLDa-ww

Length: 29min 38sec (1778 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020