Retaining Walls
A lot of the wall calls we get in St. Louis turn out to be water problems. Common ones: a downspout emptying straight behind the wall, a yard graded toward the wall instead of away, or a wall drain that was never taken to daylight and has silted shut. Loess is fine silt that washes into gravel and clogs it unless fabric keeps it out. We treat drainage as its own work, whether or not there's a wall in front of it.
St. Louis gets around 40 inches of rain a year, and a lot of it arrives in spring and summer thunderstorms that drop an inch or more in an hour. Upland soil here is loess and clay. It soaks that water up, gets heavy and pushes on anything in its way. A wall with a working drain barely notices, but a wall without one takes the full load, then goes through freeze-thaw cycles all winter.
The usual causes we find: a downspout emptying right behind the wall, a yard graded toward the wall, a patio or driveway above it sending runoff over the top, or a drain pipe that was never run to daylight.
Behind a wall, that means perforated pipe bedded in clean stone, wrapped or lined with fabric so loess can't silt it up, and run to an outlet you can actually see: through the wall face, to a swale or to a pop-up emitter in the lawn. Around the wall, we regrade so water moves away from it, bury downspouts in solid pipe to carry roof water past the wall, and shape shallow swales to move storm water across the yard.
Drainage is often the whole fix when a wall is just starting to move. It's always part of a new wall, and it frequently comes with grading and excavation.
Water is the main issue on creek-side lots in Webster Groves and Ballwin, in walk-outs in Oakville, on fill-built lots in O'Fallon, in bottomland in Chesterfield, and in alleys and yards in the city.
Typical timeline Most residential drainage jobs are one to two days, depending on run length and where the water can be sent.
Work that usually goes with this one on a St. Louis job:
Walls that lean, crack, bulge or leak soil. We find the cause first, then price a reset or a rebuild.
Learn More →Cut, fill, spoil haul-off and access work on sloped lots where getting to the wall is half the job.
Learn More →New walls to flatten a sloped yard, hold a patio or pool deck, or widen a driveway. Drainage and base priced with the wall.
Learn More →Free, No Obligation
Tell us what the wall is doing and where it is. A side-on photo helps us figure out the problem before we arrive.