Retaining Wall Construction Begins!

Now that sidewalk construction is complete, we can get started on the retaining walls. The areas were marked in white as part of the "One Call" system for notifying utilities of your plans to dig. The utilities have 3 business days to label their utilities on your property. There were about ten that were notified for our project, so after the call we crossed our fingers that there wasn't a conflict.


Sure enough, this high pressure petroleum line runs right next to our project. I had to go back to the drawing board to revise the dimensions for the wall on the far side of the house in the above picture.

He is the area in conflict. If you look carefully, you can see the yellow dot next to the gutter downspout. It is inside where our flower bed was going to be located. This dot represents a distance of 15' from the petroleum line which runs almost parallel to the side of the house.

Steve was nice enough to offer his services for a day full of digging. Here he is obviously proud of our digging accomplishment thus far.

Here's the trench by the sidewalk for the two-course wall that will serve as edging for this flower bed. The pile of stone base is left over from the concrete side patio which was removed.

We wondered how the WWII soldiers were so proficient at digging trenches. It took us all day to dig these 2' wide x 16" deep trenches. We dug about 60' linear feet of trench with a full day's work.

Job well done...note all the piles of excavated dirt in the flower beds. It was about to downpour right after this picture, so I'm glad we were able to fit it in.