Retaining Wall Contractor in Central Massachusetts

Retaining walls fail for one reason far more often than any other: water. A wall is holding back soil, and saturated soil is dramatically heavier than dry soil and pushes far harder. The walls that lean, bulge and step out of line across older Massachusetts neighborhoods are almost never walls that were built with too few blocks — they are walls that were built with no drainage stone, no filter fabric and no outlet, so every wet spring the hydrostatic pressure behind them went up and the wall moved a little further.

Greener Grass Landscaping builds retaining and freestanding walls in segmental block and natural stone: terracing a back yard that is too steep to use, holding a grade change at a driveway, building a raised bed or a seat wall around a patio, or replacing a fieldstone wall that has finally given up. The wall gets a compacted base below frost-affected depth, a level first course, drainage stone and fabric behind it, batter set into the courses, and a way for water to leave — the parts nobody sees and the only parts that determine whether it is still straight in a decade.

How a wall gets built

1. 1

   Read the slope

   Height, the load above it, how water moves across the site, and what is behind the wall decide the system, the block and whether an engineered design is called for.

2. 2

   Base and first course

   Excavate, compact, install and compact base stone, then set the first course dead level. Every error in that course is multiplied by every course above it.

3. 3

   Drainage behind it

   Clean crushed stone, filter fabric where needed and a drain with somewhere to go — so pressure never builds behind the wall in the first place.

4. 4

   Course up, cap and backfill

   Block set with the batter the system requires, compacted backfill in lifts, then caps, grading and the plantings that finish the edge.