Retaining Walls
In St. Louis most wall failures come back to water. Loess and clay behind the wall soak up a wet spring and push on it, and a wall with no drain or a clogged one starts to tip. Stepped cracks usually mean the base has settled. A timber wall usually has simply rotted. We figure out which of these you have before we price the repair, because rebuilding over the same bad drainage just brings the problem back.
How a wall fails tells you why. When the top courses tip forward and the bottom stays put, water is usually building up in the silt and clay behind a wall that has no working drain. If a crack steps diagonally through the joints, the ground under the leveling pad has moved. When soil is coming out between the blocks or muddy streaks run down the face, there's no fabric behind the wall and the native loess is washing out through the stone. A timber wall that sags in the middle usually has rotted anchors (deadmen).
Each of those has a different fix, which is why a wall repair here starts by digging behind the cap and looking.
If the base is sound and only the upper courses have moved, we take them down, replace the backfill with clean stone and fabric, fix the drain and its outlet, and relay the block. If the base has settled, the wall comes down to the footing. For rotting timber and railroad ties, the usual answer is to replace the wall with segmental block or, on older properties, limestone.
Spring is when most repair calls come in, after a wet March and April have loaded the soil. Walls that made it through the winter often let go once the storms start.
Repairs cover the whole area: century-old stone in the city and Webster Groves, timber walls in Ballwin and Oakville, and aging subdivision block walls in Chesterfield and O'Fallon.
Typical timeline Resetting a short section is often one to two days. Full rebuilds depend on length, height and how equipment gets in.
Work that usually goes with this one on a St. Louis job:
Wall drains, buried downspouts, swales and regrading. Often the real fix when a wall is only showing the symptom.
Learn More →Interlocking concrete block with geogrid and a drainage layer behind it. What most back-yard walls around here are built from.
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.