Retaining walls hold grade. On rolling, wooded lots across metro Atlanta, that means a wall is usually the reason a back yard is flat enough to use, or the reason a driveway can reach a house sitting above or below the street. Most of what we build is replacement. Sandy Springs filled in starting in the 1950s, boomed in the early 1960s once the highways went through, and kept taking infill through the 1980s, so the walls holding those yards have been working a long time. Very few of them are new.
Access shapes the job more than anything else on an established lot. Mature trees, a fence line, a patio that is staying, a driveway we are not going to break: all of it decides whether material comes in by machine or by hand, and how the excavated dirt gets out. Walking the site tells us which it will be. On some properties the old wall leaves in sections over several days, because there is one way in and the same way back out, and nothing about that changes once we start.
Failure has a look to it. Timber crossties go soft at the ground line and the wall bellies out through the middle courses. Dry-stacked block set without drainage behind it takes on water pressure it was never built to carry, and the top of the wall starts leaning out past the toe. Cracks stepping diagonally through mortar joints mean movement, not shrinkage. A wall holding up a driveway, a pool deck or a neighbor's grade is worth looking at before the lean is obvious from the street.
Most of a good wall is buried where nobody sees it. Compacted base under the first course, drainage stone behind the block, perforated pipe running out to daylight, backfill placed in lifts and compacted as it goes. Taller walls get rebar and grout in the cores, or geogrid laid back into the hill every few courses. A wall in Brookhaven and a wall off the Roswell Road corridor get the same detail, because the part that fails is nearly always the part somebody skipped. Call for a free estimate.
