Retaining wall build

The retaining wall was another thing I wanted to do ahead of time, both to spread out expenses, and because I knew it would be a ton of work.

The retaining wall is pretty large, so we used large natural limestone blocks from a local quarry.  The same guy that did the excavation work has a quarry for gravel and blocks like this, so he was the source.  He delivered blocks and large 2"+ gravel for backfill, and I built almost all of the wall myself.  The blocks range anywhere from a few hundred pounds for the small ones to a few thousand for the big stuff.  There was even one that I could not lift with the equipment I had, so it got somewhat dragged into place on the bottom row.  I suspect that one was over 5000-6000 lbs.

Initially I thought an excavator with a thumb on the bucket would be the way to go, but the one I rented was too small to do the job, and it turns out to be very hard to find a larger one with a thumb, especially if you need it NOW.  Once I tried the mini-ex, I found it lacking and knew I needed something else.  The rock guy said a skid steer would do the job well.  The tractor was able to do some limited rock moving, but it was way over it's capacity here.  The skid steer turned out the be the right tool for the job as it had massive lift capacity and was very maneuverable.  It was also easy to get stuck in the sand as I got a wheeled version (probably should have got a tracked one).  I mostly used the pallet forks on the skid steer to lift and position blocks.

Here's the 3 tools at the start, before I sent the mini-ex back. (Remember you can click on the pics for larger ones)

To start, we spent a day laying out and sorting the blocks that were delivered by size, to help things go together better.  This is taken from above the wall location (on the left) and shows the whole clearing.

With the skid steer, I was able to start building the wall.  Here is the end of Day 1

After Day 3, I had 2 full layers done.  The order of work is to lay one layer, then back fill with stone (for drainage), and you need to do this one layer at a time or it becomes very difficult to place the next layer of rock.  It is too easy to have it slip behind the wall, and then you are in a world of hurt to get that rock back out:

Day 4 progress

After 5 days, it was starting to get up there a bit

And after Day 6, I had done about all I could do with the skid steer.  The upper deck was set too far back to reach with the skid steer, so I had to get the stone guy to come help out with his excavator for that.  Here is Day 6

Here is Chris (the rock guy) using his excavator on the upper deck, getting started.

After Day 2 of this, we were almost done:

A little more final cleanup on the 3rd day, and here are some views of the completed wall

Here's the final stats on the wall:

Blocks: 200 tons
Backfill crushed rock: 180 tons
Length: 170'
Max height : ~10'

That's a lotta rocks!  I was pretty wiped out by the end of that, and very glad I did not wait until we started building the house to do it.

That's it for the catch-up part of this story.  The wall was completed in Nov 2012.  Now we are up to this year and beginning the actual house build.  I will put a few views of the plans in the next post to show what it will look like.