Retaining Walls

The rains that come to the Denver area in the afternoons in the Summer have taught us a lesson - one needs a way of retaining the dirt in the yard so it doesn't end up in the neighbor's yard or, worse yet, in the neighbor's garage!

We've installed rock retaining walls around the sides of the house and in the front to control the loss of dirt. As an aside, the rock walls also provide areas to plant trees, annual flowers, native xeriscape plants (plants that thrive at higher altitude with little or no water), and succulents.

The walls are around three feet high and are constructed of granite rocks. The crew building the wall are truly amazing ...... they brought in a dump truck full of rocks, dumped them in the driveway, started the cement mixer going, stood there looking at the rocks for about 15 minutes, walked over to the pile and picked up a rock / hit it with a hammer a couple of times to shape it / put it in place / slapped some cement in back of it ...... went back to the pile and did it all over again.

The wall grew from a single course of rock at the bottom to a tapered wall several feet long and then to a full-height wall extending the full length of the driveway. I'll guess that there's no more than a half-inch between rocks at any point - they fit together very tightly. The wall in the foreground here was completed in one day by two members of the crew!

This view, along the East side of the house, has 4 walls, two more nearer the back of the house, another in the front of the house, and yet another to the south of the corner of the garage.

The walls signal a couple of things - there's detail work going on now, so we've moved out of the "rough" phase and into a more detailed phase of construction (that's good!) and we're getting closer to being able to add a few plants to the area around the house!

Cheers!