How to Build a Short Retaining Wall

hey everyone it's melissa from welcome to the woods in my last video you saw me talk about the grading issues and the water damage we've had on this side of our lake house i've replaced the rotted siding but now it's time to take care of the grating we excavated out almost two yards of earth from this side of the house and we're going to have to build a big retaining wall to keep back the rest from eroding now i hope that this video can be helpful for you to learn a bit about how to build a retaining wall and and to just see that while it is a big project you can do it yourself to get started on our retaining wall we planned out where we want to build it it's going to be an l shape and dug a trench that was about 10 inches wide we had this pipe from our sprinkler system running through so we're going to make sure to place the wall around that and we dug it down deep enough that the paver base is going to cover it completely so in the trench we're going to fill paver base to be at least four inches thick this is going to give the retaining wall a steady base to build on top of that won't shift and move around so for this project i actually have help from my father-in-law don and he has built a few retaining walls in the past so i really appreciate his help on this project not only for his strength but his knowledge as well so the paver base you're going to want to have a pretty uniform thickness but you're also going to want to make sure that it is basically level doesn't have to be perfect but in order to do that you simply fill your paper base thick into your trench and then you screed it we used a two by four just moving it across the surface to get it mostly flattened and level then you check it with a long level ideally at least four feet or six feet long and you adjust as necessary tamping the paver base down if you don't tamp your paver base down it's not going to be as solid and unmoving as you need in order to build a retaining wall on top of it before i lay my blocks i'm also checking level the short direction of the trench and adjusting as needed just to make sure one side isn't like a lot higher than the other you'll see i'm using a work pro level work pro levels are some of my favorites because they're so lightweight aluminum and work pro is actually sponsoring this video i have tons of their tools i use all the time especially their workbench which i'll talk about a little bit later work pro is currently running a big back to school sale on their site so just visit that by clicking on the link in the description on this video to check them out once your paper base has been prepared you can start laying your block just set your first row wherever you want to start and pound it into the paper base using a rubber mallet if you use a heavier type of hammer you might risk cracking the cement block use your short level to check horizontal and vertical placing the first row of blocks is so important i can't stress how important it is to get this row level because the whole rest of the wall depends on it laying the first row is the majority of the work in building a retaining wall so it might feel tedious and like it's taking forever but after this the project goes a lot faster as you start to get multiple blocks in a row you want to make sure you're also using a longer level across all the blocks in succession to make sure that it's level all the way across you can adjust your paper base and you can tamp on the concrete blocks to make it work but you have to get them all level before moving on now you might wonder where i'm getting all these blocks there's actually these circle gardens with retaining wall block around them in the front of the lake house property so we're actually stealing them from there it was so nice not to have to haul them all so here you'll see a clip of dawn using this cement saw you can rent one of these big saws this is kind of an overkill size you can get them smaller but you can rent these from a general rental we actually had a neighbor who works in concrete so he lent this big one to us this is going to cut the concrete block in half because your second row you're going to want to start with a half block and every other row you start with a half block so that you can actually stagger the seams and make your wall extra strong this video is sponsored by work pro tools throughout this project you'll see me use work pro tools because of their ingenuity and power my favorite has been the five in 1 workbench you can adjust the height and transform it to do so many things i've used it the most as a scaffolding to work more safely when renovating the wheels and casters allow it to transform to a dolly or a creeper for mechanic work i've used it this way as a rolling platform to move things around with ease it can become a workbench top with storage for your tools and helpful measurements handy add the included rails and the workbench even becomes a sliding miter saw stand and if you're wiser than me and have your miter saw hooked into a shop vac there's a whole power strip right on the side check out work pro tools by clicking on the link in the description of this video and for a limited time get 15 percent off this versatile workbench with my discount code after your first row is laid you can start thinking about drainage behind the wall you're not ready for p rock yet but you are ready for drain tile so this corrugated pipe has slits across it that it let water escape and you can see we created an attachment so that we can have an arm that goes behind this section of the wall and then when it turns we have a long piece of the pipe that runs the length of the long side of the wall so this is going to get a special product on it called the drain sleeve which prevents the drain tile from clogging it's kind of like a mesh fabric i'm just going to slip that right over the corrugated pipe and this is going to prevent it from clogging and it's going to help it work more efficiently well functioning drainage behind the wall like this is going to prevent erosion and possible failure of the wall in the future subsequent layers of block that gets laid on top of the first row are quite easy all you have to do is stagger them halfway across the previous block and then feel for that lip in the back and make sure that that's pressed all the way up against the back of the previous row you can see me feeling for it here and pulling the block forward until it stops when you're done placing all your block to the height of your wall you can fill behind with p-rock we filled with a lot of p-rack that fully covered our drain towel and went all the way up to a couple inches shy of the top of the wall then we filled on top of that with black dirt making sure that we sloped the black dirt away from the wall the point of both of these things is so that water doesn't come up against the wall frequently and if it does it can drain through the soil down and away without causing erosion for our wall we chose to do top caps um this is optional you wouldn't need to this is just to make the top look a little nicer so i was placing these and then i got to the corner and i was really perplexed on what to do i didn't know um how to go about that but don had the great idea of cutting two blocks at a 45 degree angle and connecting those together so that it creates a turn and then just building off of the corner so i would say that that worked wonderfully and if you have a similar issue start with your most difficult cuts do those first and build off of that now that the wall was finally built we had a significant more landscaping to do i raked all the rock back above the wall kind of where the ac unit is and this we sloped away from the house and towards the drain tile so towards the corner of the wall we also did more excavating where the retaining wall is keeping soil back from coming up near the house you can see that we drew a line that slopes down towards the backyard and we also sloped the earth away from the wall and away from the house we created kind of a goalie in between this isn't going to be super visible once we put the rock there what actually matters is the way that the soil is sloped because the soil is packed and the water is going to run right through the rock you can see on this project even my husband decided to join in and help with the landscaping so while the boys were digging out more earth i decided to move forward with the poly layer this thick black poly is going to get laid down underneath the rock that we replace this is going to prevent weeds from growing up it's going to prevent erosion and it's just a good practice whenever you're landscaping with rocks we measured the width of this area that we need to lay the poly and realize that we could just double it up i think i bought a roll that was eight feet by a hundred feet so it's going to be folded in half double thick and laid here to protect this area from getting wrecked after all the hard work we put into it next was to replace the rock on top of the poly and my landscaping here is almost done one more quick mention that you want to have the earth the landscaping whatever you're doing come up about halfway to the height of the first row of blocks i also decided to take some landscape adhesive this is pl 500 to glue down all the top caps now i did not do this with each layer of block sometimes when people build retaining walls they put construction adhesive between each layer but i decided to just put adhesive on the top caps since that's like the decorative area i don't want moving around and they finish off the wall nicely and i personally feel adhesive on each row is unnecessary you can see for our retaining wall design i decided to step it down that's because the earth slopes down towards the backyard here and i thought it would look weird to have it all really tall at the end but you can also see that we just use that cement saw to cut the top cap so that they ended up flush at the end of every retaining wall block layer so it all looks intentional even as the wall steps down this is how the wall looks from up on top by the ac unit when we're all done i am so happy to not have to worry about grading issues on this side of the house anymore and i know now with the retaining wall and the replaced siding that we're not going to have continuous water damage against the house like we have in the past i am so grateful to my father-in-law dawn for all his help on this project and i hope that we showed you some tips and tricks if you're trying to build your own retaining wall too if you enjoyed this video be sure to hit subscribe on welcome to the woods to see what i'm up to next i'm doing a full exterior makeover on this house so there's a lot to come [Music]

Channel: Welcome to the Woods

Views: 106,352

Keywords: retaining wall, how to build a retaining wall, diy retaining wall, short retaining wall, small retaining wall, block retaining wall, build retaining wall, retaining wall design, level retaining wall

Id: _h8h2ZMKfXM

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022