What it is
A retaining wall holds back soil. That sentence covers everything important: what’s behind it (saturated, freezing, frost-heaving soil) is what fails the wall, not what’s in front of it. Build the wall with that in mind and it lasts. Build it as a stack of pretty stones and it leans in three winters.
When you need it
- A grade change of more than two feet, especially in lake-country lots that slope to water
- A terraced garden, planting bed, or stepped walkway
- A driveway cut or walkout basement that needs the slope held
- An existing wall that’s bowing, leaning, or pushing forward
How we do it
We dig to the frost line — in this part of Wisconsin that’s forty-two inches minimum, sometimes more on heavy clay. We pour or place a compacted base of three-quarter washed stone, level, and start the wall. Behind every course we backfill with clean drainage stone wrapped in filter fabric, with a perforated drain pipe at the base that daylights to grade. The wall itself batters back — leans into the hill — at about an inch per foot of height. Above four feet we engineer in geogrid reinforcement tied to the soil mass behind. We cap with a flat stone or block that sheds water away from the joint.
Materials and methods
- Wisconsin lannon and Bedford limestone for natural-stone walls
- Granite fieldstone for rustic, weathered installs
- Versa-Lok, Allan Block, Unilock segmental retaining wall systems for engineered work
- Three-quarter washed stone drainage backfill, never sand or native soil
- Filter fabric between drainage stone and native soil
- Frost-line footings — never floating bases on Midwest soil
- Geogrid reinforcement above four feet of exposed height
A retaining wall is a drainage project that happens to look like a stone wall. Treat it the other way around and water will tell you why that’s wrong.