How to build a RETAINING WALL that WON'T fall over!

[Music] what's up happy people so we got a new project today and we got a classic retaining wall failing retaining wall and rebuilding it so the question was hey we got a retaining wall here that's got some trouble can we come in and can you you know can you come in and repair it there's one answer to that question yeah we can repair it tear it all down start over go to your brand new one it's built right [Music] [Applause] [Music] so been here saying there's no way he could screw this up but what I was just got done chiding him about was always do your measurements from your zero point zero point game Pappas step right here and we were trying to figure out how low to make reservation for this wall which we did it successfully figure that out but we did the math the calculations twice what to decide whether we want three courses or whether we need three courses or four courses and the argument was what that we put matter that we calculate math on top of math so you wanted to calculate the three course wall block you know just add another one on yeah yeah yeah and then what happens is you screw things up you screw things but maybe maybe nine times out of ten put your screw things up when you add nap on top of that because hey then what happened about four weeks ago why cuz he added math on top of math that's why he's gonna get rid of me I'm gonna do what you like how everyone what separation fabric to school like you're having the last 400 maybe they didn't watch the video okay come on I'll just say it again yep sure go ahead so what I deal with every day it's better than that well so yeah this is separation fabric at the point of separation fabric is that it keeps the our stone base separated from the subgrade underneath it we don't want dirt and mud pushing up in our subgrade so that's that it's basically just a stability factor so that's so putting our stone base on top of the separation fabric and compacting it with our compactor hug you can hear me he's loud we're dumping our to a stone base into the swing excavator sitting up there right up there to get that just like that yeah this thing is a slickers little tool [Music] now that is slick didn't even break a sweat [Music] [Music] all right so never-ending drama we have waterline sewer line that's fine water lines deep it's out of our way sewer line need not so much gasoline problem you see what the cutter wall blocked around it it's not much of a problem what do you do happy Monday morning - yeah we're back here new week fresh start and I'm gonna say we're wrapping this job up tomorrow night that's my prediction Ben was in here on Friday while I was out doing photography and actually got that wall almost done except for some cap and we're gonna start laying in this wall right here today I'd like to get this thing I think it's probably gonna be feasible to get this thing pretty well laid today and then do things like cap and detail work tomorrow wrapping up all the dirt work and all that not a whole lot basically working off the street here as you can see makes for a bit of a challenging job site but very little cleanup and - so what you got going on there being it's a good question maybe violence that looks like a 22 and a half which actually it's not gonna work now we got pipes everywhere it's the joys of working in a city project we have water sewer been how do you how do you know that that's sewer about how you do it sniff test okay and gas and that gas line is not deep at all right up there it was like two inches below the surface of the concrete just incredible I can't believe they get away with stuff like that we they hit that thing no my goodness let's not even talk about that well so we're gonna work around all that stuff there we're pretty close to having a space that one needs to be we got some spectators this morning [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay well that's a beautiful sight right there we got a beautifully flat straight wall so it's time to core fill this first level and then we're onto the easy part slapping of course as a wall block and geogrid of course but I'll show you a few more steps of the things we do to prevent wall failure as opposed to like the wall that was in here just so you kind of get an idea of what makes a difference right there is our step you can see like those stone dates make there's then buried course reporter calls for this wall and then we step it up one step because we had to be over top of the gas sewer all that jazz and it's still below grade the bottom of this block is still below grade then sport Nina clips which is the structural part of bonding one course to the other [Music] [Applause] things are heavy somewhere in the range of 100 pounds of piece either way one [Music] [Applause] [Music] we have course number two late in a drainage is in this is perforated core get a drain pipe behind this hole and it exits out through the wall down here so that right yeah comes right in through here then exits through the wall right there as a drain so this water any water that builds up behind this wall can build up and that's it right through that drain without causing any pressure on this wall and causing it to fail so one of the key things of building a retaining wall properly is managing your water command you're managing your moisture properly so that freezin thaw won't eventually push it over so right now we basically have to extend the porter right here have to do another a little bit of stone base so that we can get a last piece of block laid in there you keep working away into that return and that's course number three four five and six today I'm gonna show you how to put a step in the base course of your wall so let's say you have a grade you're building a retaining wall up a slight incline and suddenly you got like two courses of wall block underneath the final grade level where you're never gonna see it so like well how do I step this off keep on going I'll show you how to do it very simply very easily so here is basically I am at the end of mine this is my second course I already have one step in underneath here this is my second course of wall block coming in through here and I'm at the point here where I want to pack this in do a step and so I can run my next wall block further out past the end of this block but I can't suspend it in midair it's got to be supported underneath that so this is how it is step so first I'm gonna shovel this full of to a stone it's a two-way modify it's like a it's like I write here it is it's like a three quarter inch stone base with fines what we put in the base course of our wall block over all the retaining walls I'm gonna show that in there then compact it then a setting bed of number-9 wash stone and then ready for my wall block all right so I have this shovel full stone turn the compactor [Music] so now we have this - a stone compact it in here and we use a jumping jab because of how tight quarters we had otherwise we would use one of those plate compactors that because of these tight quarters I use a jumping jack and now you can see my the top of my - a stone base is about an inch lower than the top of my block and that is on purpose because now I'm going to put in my fine stone a number 9 size washed stone in here as my setting bed and I'll screed that off level it off and then it's ready to transition from hard block to another step of base stone so now we have a round one-inch steel pipe buried right here and what we'll do is we pick our laser transit that is set up because that's a matching and then we will adjust this and put leaves bang on there so now that we have a laser level set we can go from the top of this block and match the top of that metal screed Pole [Applause] now we know if we drag our hand trowel or the top of this pole it's gonna match the top of our nines going to match the top of this wall block perfectly doing that gap and we're ready to go now you have good hard compaction you want to make sure that you get good hard compaction all three sides around the block you don't want to just stop right there because that'll keep on settling and you might end up having some settles between this point and your fade [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] I'd say the key reason is failing was because of lack of dreams material behind the wall you can see here we have a perforated pipe and a whole bunch of clean stone nothing but clean stone behind this wall and the reason for that is any ground water that comes down through this Bank has an escape follows that pipe that's buried just a few inches below behind this wall and it makes an exit right there so it hasn't as the ability to seep out which in turn does not allow any pressure to build up behind the wall as well as does not allow moisture to be to stay behind the wall because if there were moisture this is what's made that old wall fail if there's moisture behind a retaining wall winter comes it freezes what happens to water when it freezes it expands so it freezes and thaws freezes and thaws and over time that whole thing just starts moving forward at the time winter comes and gives another freeze cycle and pushes it flowed a bit more and so eventually it falls over which is wings having to the wall that we ripped out of here but with proper drainage we never allow that moisture to group up you know we never allow that moisture to exist behind the wall and we eliminate that problem so back to the geogrid it's this stuff right here now the drainage is one key point to building a what retaining wall it won't fail this stuff is another key point for retaining walls four feet or more depending on the wall blocking using some wall blocks it's less than 14 but this is a very heavy structural wall block but what this stuff is it's a structural grid it's a very strong extremely strong it gets pinched between every two rows of wall blocks and then what it does is it goes back behind the wall and once we have an extra wall block laying on here with that geogrid pinched in between we will then dump our next level of a clean stone on top of all this and well actually run that plate compactor very lightly and gently behind this wall on top of that just lock that stone to this geogrid so suddenly you just don't you don't just have a vertical element holding this wall back now you have a horizontal element that goes way back into the bank it goes as far back into the bank as the wall is tall that's one of the ones with geogrid Jerry should go as far back into the bank as the wall is tall so if this were an 8 foot high wall we want up your grid going back 8 feet on the last level so what that does is it just ties the entire wall back into the bank so that it's just locked in there it can resend a ton of force without actually failing and falling forward so good [Music] good morning happy people we got a thundershower last night which was perfect because we are so dry right now it's this whole job site with an absolute dust bomb so settle the dust a little bit and it's not raining now what more could you ask for so right now we are focusing on this wall right here this is that little wing wall up here at the top that we are that we rebuilt and we're gonna focus and get this cap down here today this is an existing drain line that comes from his spouting further up so we're rerouting that around the wall out there to the street and I love them off a little area right here the homeowner would like the place to fit put his trash cans on garbage pickup day so we're gonna level that off a little bit while we're recreating all this soon as we have all the little detail work done around here we are moving down to this wall and we're gonna finish it all right so we basically got that graded off to level that out a little bit and we'll folks that's ready for stone and then peer setting these couple of paving stones inform and we installed that new drain line cover up a little bit right here you can see right there's a new pop-up drain which works a lot better than just a lighting out with that black corrugated pipe is that stuff will crush eventually we have another drain line coming over from the other side of the house that we need add a light through that wall right here so that that pipe right there with that green thing on the end needs to get rerouted punch through the wall [Music] okay so we now have the few grid laid in here and it's very important that the geo grid itself is level you don't want its landing uphill or downhill behind the wall that reduces its structure and its strength so it's level on top of see if you notice we had to dig out five six feet behind this wall so we have room for the grid this wall is about five feet high so not even quite no it's not even five feet four and a half feet so we're actually going a little bit overkill rule of thumb is geo grid should go as far back into the bank as the hot as your wall is high so we're a little bit overkill with it but rather do that than under you know but the two biggest things that make a retaining wall built right and not set up to fail its proper drainage which we ever drainage pipes there and for a walls that are depending on the type of wall block you're using for this wall block it's four feet four walls that are four feet and over geogrid jiggery gives it that strength locks it into the bank behind it and couldn't that's pushover so now we are gonna finish we're gonna fill this whole cavity up here with another layer of stone up to the height of that wall block now we're gonna set another grid of geogrid between the next course so there'll be two levels of geogrid in the behind this wall and it's gonna be rock-solid Smike one anywhere all right bad now you can start up the skid loader make a whole pile no it's all right seems like every time I want a video something he starts up the Machine and runs it they can't hear anything [Applause] [Music] have you guys seen the truck we got oh my goodness we are in susie-q a truck needed to go in for some work and so we got the legendary Suzy Q's he was quite a history with custom landscaping she's a she's a female we refer to her she and it's been around probably longer than any of the rest of us guys so she needs respect time lapse just died so that's it for that other battery got the bag we are just now slapping on this cap got this corner fixed up and we're gonna cut some cap around the curve here and we officially made the last cuff just washing off some of the dust off the top of this cap here which got hit with the rain shower where I was cutting so it puts a like a residue on top that would stain it put the top so up here behind the wall seed some grass it's a wrap okay yeah nice froggy oh hey you see that black behind the wall now to see grass on from migrating down through that clean stone behind a wall over time if it would if the fabric were not there that dirt would eventually might be done through that clean stone and we wouldn't have a risk of freezes all pushing this wall so that's why that's there keep the stone stone to keep the dirt so what do you think [Music] we had a wall retaining wall that was falling over and we just couldn't deal with it any longer so we called tusky mountain to make him over and gave us an estimate and we like the estimate and we went up and pick the stone and when they came they finished a beautiful product here for us we're very happy and that right there people is a wall that's gonna be there for decades it's not gonna fall over homeowners made the right choice [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tussey Landscaping

Views: 944,646

Keywords: how to build a retaining wall, retaining wall, how to build a retaining wall that wont fall over, retaining wall failure, how to build a retaining wall that wont fail, retaining wall falling over, retaining wall geo grid, geo grid, retaining wall backfill, how to backfill a retaining wall, how to use geo grid on a retaining wall, retaining wall construction, tussey landscaping, retaining wall contractor, altoona pa

Id: A0Eb2tBKoFw

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 14 2020