Retaining Walls
Most new walls we're asked for in the St. Louis area do one of a few jobs. They turn a back yard that slopes toward a creek into flat, usable lawn, hold up a patio or pool deck, or widen a driveway cut into a hillside. What makes a new wall last is how deep the base goes, how far the geogrid runs back and where the water ends up. We size those to the soil we dig into on your lot, loess or clay or rock, not to a stock detail.
A new wall is designed from what's above and behind it. A three-foot garden terrace with lawn above it is a simple wall. A five-foot wall holding up a driveway, a pool deck or a slope that keeps rising is not, and it needs longer geogrid, a deeper base and often an engineer's design. A lot of jurisdictions around St. Louis ask for a permit and a stamped design once a wall goes past roughly four feet. We check yours before we draw anything.
Two shorter terraces often beat one tall wall. They cost less, they're easier to drain, and they usually stay under that threshold.
St. Louis upland soil is loess over clay. It's fine to build on, but when it's wet it pushes hard and washes into anything that isn't protected with fabric. Every new wall we build gets a compacted crushed-stone leveling pad, clean stone behind it rather than native backfill, fabric between that stone and the soil, and a perforated pipe run to daylight. Where the slope needs it, the excavation goes deep enough for geogrid to reach back into undisturbed ground.
The face can be block, boulders or poured concrete. The engineering behind it is the same.
Common projects include flattening back yards in Ballwin and Chesterfield, house-pad and driveway walls in Wildwood and Arnold, subdivision lot-line walls in O'Fallon, and walk-out walls in Oakville.
Typical timeline A typical back-yard wall is several working days once access is set. Weather and spoil haul-off set the pace more than the block does.
Work that usually goes with this one on a St. Louis job:
Interlocking concrete block with geogrid and a drainage layer behind it. What most back-yard walls around here are built from.
Learn More →Wall drains, buried downspouts, swales and regrading. Often the real fix when a wall is only showing the symptom.
Learn More →Cut, fill, spoil haul-off and access work on sloped lots where getting to the wall is half the job.
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.