Wall of Retention

It's about time we start putting up some posts with progress on the house.  Our lot is on a bit of a hill so we have been building a retaining wall along the back sides we can have a reasonably level back yard some day.    This also gives us an excuse to spend time over at the lot watching progress on basement and foundation.  The less dirt we have to haul away in dump trucks the less money we will spend hauling dirt away in dump trucks, so we needed to get the retaining wall up post haste.  Here is the back side of the lot which abutting the neighbors.  They recently built a house on this lot and put in the fence:

A groundbreaking of sorts

Getting the first row down is a ton of work but after that it stacks pretty quickly. Here I am putting in first couple of blocks:

Yes, I know I am going bald, thanks for pointing that out, jerk

Steph paid close attention while I was putting in the first set of blocks and since then she has become quite proficient.  She has built a bunch of the wall on days when new blocks were delivered while I was still at work and I hate to say it but she did a great job.
 

Hi weirdo

This is the completed first section, you can sort of see at the back a corner starting since the wall turns there at the back side of the property.  I won't bore you with pictures of the back side, but that is what we have been working on most recently and finished it off last Friday:

Ran out of blocks, need to wait for another deliver

The blocks we are using are the big ones and turned out to weight to much for the kids to lift them.  In their boredom there was a dirt clod stacking contest:

Wait for it, wait for it...

Luke's patience with that sort of contest wore thin pretty quickly, but this is right down Brigham's alley.  I was impressed with his tower:

ta da

On the hot days, the kids like to climb down into the hole we dug to find the sewer line, it is much cooler down there:

glad to see you are wearing pajamas Feebs

So anyway, back to the stupid retaining wall, I didn't want to stack it too high without backfilling for fear that it would tip over backward, so we had to get the french drain in place and backfill before getting to the full height:

French drain covered in river rock

By now if you are still with me you cannot believe that there could be a post this long about a freaking retaining wall.  Choke on it, I could do this all day.

first backfilling

More stacking:

seven high - original final height

We were originally planning for it to be 5 1/2 or 6 feet high, which stinks because anything over 4 feet high needs permits and engineering.  So, we were going to make it tiered to get around that, but as we got all the measurements back from sewer line etc. we decided we could make due with just 4 foot wall and small slope in the hard to the back porch, so we ended up with 8 blocks high:

once I put a fence along the top, neighbors are going to wonder why they needed that fence

What you can't see to the right is the electrical box.  We can't complete the rest of the wall until we get all the electrical and trenched and run.  Also we will need to pour the sidewalk since this wall will curve around and run alongside the sidewalk after passing electrical and water.  For the moment, we take a break from building our beloved retaining wall.