"64Mali" (ctaaffe64)
03/14/2016 at 12:25 • Filed to: Houseoppolink
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"64Mali" (ctaaffe64)
03/14/2016 at 12:25 • Filed to: Houseoppolink | 8
| 6 |
This weekend I embarked on the project to fix / replace my retaining wall at my house. It had begun to collapse and was going to cause some damage to my car if it went.
Fell out just by poking.
You can see how close the wall is to the garage and foundation of the house.
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My friend Lurv (who you may remember from other adventures) and my brother in law (BIL) showed up to help. I got about 3 hours of work out of my BIL before his wife came calling and he had to go home.
First up was removing the old wall.
My BIL doing some excavating
Can you believe they let me rent a tractor this big with only a $20 online course that had a 9 question quiz (and unlimited attempts).
This was the largest boulder we removed, the backhoe actually had trouble picking it up. It ended up taking out a small tree when it rolled down the hill where I was dumping all the rocks. Most of them were about 1/2 this size, gotta love New England.
Cleaning up the work area a bit more, if you look next to Lurv you can see how many times they painted around the rock that was against the foundation. We then fought to dig the holes for the 6x6 PT boards. The “One Man” Eager Beaver weighted a ton and with some many rocks it fought us at every turn. Lurv then preceded to pick up the 6x6 and drop them into the holes, the dude is a tank. By this time my BIL had left, now that we had to do the hard part.
For the next few hours we worked out of the back of the Uhual
Slowly the wall started to take shape,
It then started to get late so we emptied the uhual returned it and Lurv went home. The biggest issue was back filling the wall now as there had been more rocks than dirt.
Sunday morning I started shoveling more and more dirt behind the wall, each time adding another 4x4.
I added the 6x6 to edge the dirt and to act as a support, I will spike it into the ground and tier up to the wall.
I got bored of this and took out some bushes for a few min, made a nice new flat spot for parking.
My father then showed up to help me finish up the wall, we cut off the top of the 6x6s to use as the tiered support. Then we added gravel in where there was just dirt not pavement.
All done and I added a ton of room to my driveway. Even better is it wont fall over on my car now. Just sucked that I had to spend money on it, however driving that backhoe was waaaay to much fun. I kind of want one now.
fourvalleys
> 64Mali
03/14/2016 at 12:34 |
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That actually looks pretty nice. How deep did you set the posts?
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64Mali
> fourvalleys
03/14/2016 at 12:35 |
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about 1.5 feet, no where near as deep as I wanted but so many rocks.
BorkBorkBjork
> 64Mali
03/14/2016 at 13:58 |
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Underground stuff is a pain in the ass. I was doing sprinkler work yesterday and hit what I though was a rock. Nope! Apparently someone decided that they were just going to bury a brick wall instead of remove it, because work is hard. Homeownership is still great, though.
TheRealBicycleBuck
> 64Mali
03/14/2016 at 15:12 |
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I’m hoping you put some of that gravel behind the wall to drain water.
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64Mali
> TheRealBicycleBuck
03/14/2016 at 15:16 |
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yeah there is plenty of gravel behind and the 4x4 on the bottom are sitting on gravel. I just make it look pretty .
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TheRealBicycleBuck
> 64Mali
03/14/2016 at 15:28 |
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Excellent! Crisis averted!