Using a boulder wall as an 8′ retaining wall (Dallas area)

retaining-wall

I've got an 8' retaining wall, runs about 120' across the back of my property (faces my house). It's railroad ties and has about run its life.

I'm looking to replace with some kind of stone/block wall. Had contractors out for bids on using engineered block.

But I'm also wondering about what's called "Boulder walls". Basically, just stacking (with skill) large 1000+lb boulders in place, after digging out the ties, then backfilling with gravel, plus using a french drain along the top to drain off excess.

Is this something that's not advisable in this area, or would it be ridiculously expensive vs using block, so no one does it?

Best Answer

The engineering on such a wall may prove difficult. We recently built a 6' retaining wall and a couple of 5' retaining walls. The 6' wall was 32 MPA concrete spray using our pool as the footing, the 5' walls are steel reinforced, core-filled besser blocks with footings 600mm deep and 1000m wide. In both cases, using steel and concrete, the engineering was complex. We rendered both walls. We constructed our walls this way to minimise the foot print (the walls are 200mm thick).

Using something like boulders could prove tricky unless you have a 45 degree angle of repose - this would simplify things but also eat up a lot of your back yard.

My neighbour has just build a shorter retaining wall with besser blocks then added a rock finish afterwards - looks rather nice.

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