Concrete retaining walls in Junction City KS - a wall that drains and holds your slope

Most calls start with a bank that keeps washing out, an old timber or block wall that's started to lean, or a yard that drops off where you'd like a flat spot for a patio. The price moves with the wall's height and length, the type of wall the site calls for, how much digging and drainage go in behind it, and how easily we can get a crew and a concrete truck to it. The schedule turns on the weather, on whether a permit is needed, and on giving the wall time to gain strength before any soil goes back against it. Your own figure comes in the written estimate I send after walking the site with you.

I start by measuring the wall's line and height and watching where water runs on your lot, because water building up behind a wall is what pushes it. The wall's size and steel come from the design for your site, not a guess off its height, since a driveway, a slope or a building above it changes the load. Once underground lines are marked, we dig out and form the footing, the wide base the wall stands on, then tie in the rebar, steel bars inside the forms that take the bending concrete can't handle on its own. After the pour we let the wall cure, the wait while concrete gains strength, before any soil touches it. Then we place drain rock and fabric behind it with a perforated pipe that empties through clear outlets, backfill in thin layers packed with light equipment so we don't shove the wall, and grade the top so water runs away. If the budget gets tight, I'll keep the footing and drainage and cut back on the face first, because nobody can fix what's buried once it's backfilled.

A wall usually comes with flat concrete at its top or its foot. When the wall levels a yard for a pool, we can pour the concrete pool deck around it and slope it so water runs away from both the pool and the wall. When it cuts into a hillside for a shop or a walkout room, we can handle the concrete floor installation inside as well.

In Junction City, the Building and Code Enforcement Division handles permits and enforces the city's current codes for all residential construction, new or remodel. Its permit list names fences, garages and carports and doesn't name retaining walls, so whether your wall needs one isn't settled until someone asks. I check with the city or county office on every job, and when a permit is needed we pull it before work starts and call in the inspections as the wall reaches them. If you'd like to ask yourself, the city's building permits office is the place to call.

We're based in Junction City and work in the cities around it. Most wall calls here come from yards that fall toward the street, driveways cut along a bank and old walls that have started to lean, and we see the same kinds of lots on jobs in Manhattan and Abilene. On each one I look at where the water goes before I look at the wall.