Learn About Retaining Walls

Who doesn’t want to have a fine-looking building facade without the worry of erosion? Ever wondered how to make it as beautiful doing erosion control? Many would think this as a difficult task to achieve especially with sloping grounds. However, this is made possible by the beautiful option of using materials like bricks for retaining walls.

A traditional and inexpensive way of erosion control is by the use of plants. Planting a lot of trees or surrounding the entire yard with greens and vegetations minimizes the risk for soil erosion. However, in most hilly areas, this method is inadequate in holding the ground together. The best method for erosion control nowadays is opting for retaining walls installation.

Retainingwalls are intentionally built to hold back soil that has the tendency to move downwards. It can be built using different materials depending on what is available. It can be made from concrete, wood, timber, rocks, interlocking blocks or bricks. 

Various Options

While still serving its purpose, a retaining wall can be decorative, as well.  You can choose to use solid wall blocks that is perfect if you plan to have contoured and curved designs.  It is intended to make installation easy especially to amateurs. It also comes in different colors so you can choose the color that suits you. There are also randomly shaped wall faces with varying looks that create a more modern and unique look. Retaining walls that utilize these materials may appear to have different looks at different angles and at different times of the day. Another option is the use of cultured stones, which creates that natural look of an original stone but having various colors. More choices are available if you opt to have retaining walls using stackstone, bolderstone, and sandstone. 

Regardless of the type of material you use, among the first thing to consider is whether or not you have enough materials needed for the area you want to cover. If the materials are at hand, you can start to mark the area to which you will build the wall.  After that, you are set to do some digging.  Work out a 300mm by 300mm dimension trench.  Place steel mesh into it and some concrete.  After that, you put the towel for bricks as well as the first layer of bricks.  The gap between bricks should be about 50mm.  Now that you’ve started it, the rest will just follow.  Just continue until you reach your target height. Make sure, though, that the back of the wall is waterproof so that you can make sure that the brick will not accumulate any moisture in the future.  Perhaps you can make use of some sealant to ensure that. Also, see to it that you secure a building permit when you intend to do high retaining walls especially when the purpose is for erosion control.  Depending on the area, there are instances when the government regulates wall height to avoid wall collapses that may be a risk to many.