As a follow-up post to one I made a few years ago, I just wanted to quickly post the picture of the board Dave made on our wall. I believe it was his first board, and he says it’s a little heavy and not super surfable. He has since perfected the art, you should click here to check them out, or hit up their Facebook page!
So thanks to Brandon we were able to get a lot more work done on the yard yesterday and after reading a lot about concrete bag retaining walls we decided to give it a try… We had some good and some bad come of it so far.
What we were told to do:
– Look up city guidelines to see if a permit is required.
– Level the area for the retaining wall roughly making sure it is wide enough for one cement bag a 3″ drain and gravel.
– Lay out the concrete bags end to end tamping down to make them even.
– Backfill with drain pipe and then gravel for each level of the wall.
– Layer in a brickwork pattern and wet down the bags every two rows (we only built a 2’tall wall so it wasn’t difficult.)
– The top 4inches behind the new wall should be soil compacted down to make sure water rolls off the wall and doesn’t pool behind it.
– Water the bags until the paper is completely soaked and continue soaking for 20min (as a tip we also are keeping the bags wet for the next few days)
What you are not told:
– If you use the bags that are “water resistant” from a big box store you can cut slashes in the tops of the bags to allow more moisture in, but MAKE SURE YOU DO IT BEFORE ADDING WATER!!! Cutting into a semi wet bag of cement will cause the cement to stay in the grooved cut.
– Do not put ANY pressure on the top of the bags for some time and do not try to adjust the bags once wet. This will cause the front rounded section to separate from the rest of the block being created…. I do not know the actual result as we are going to wait for the bags to wilt away, but I will post pictures when I do.
What started out as an attempt by a very mean spirited person to cause our family nothing but headaches became a very easy lesson to learn. We found out a few weeks ago that we needed a permit for our bathroom project completed in January of 2009. We pulled the info off the sight so as not to encourage anyone to do something they shouldn’t and called code enforcement. It seemed incredibly daunting at first, but in fact was very easy. The gentleman I worked with from code enforcement was very nice and helped me figure out the proper steps to take. I went to the building department not completely sure of what I needed to do, and they were even more helpful. The main guy there actually brought out a checklist of everything I needed to submit our fixes and even pulled out a sample of what it should look like. I must say I was not expecting that much help. He made it so easy I went home and in one day got together everything we needed – it helped that we had taken pictures of everything and documented it.
If anyone has any questions on building codes I highly recommend going to the main city hall building and asking the people who work there because they made it so easy. So all in all it ended up working out for the best, we are permitted now and just have to set up the inspection when we get a free day.
So thank you to the awful individual that has nothing better to do with his time than make others as miserable as he clearly is, because what came of it ended up being a better understanding of the correct way to get things done.
We are working on filling our pool today! Here are a couple of pictures.
A friend that knows my bacon obsession sent me a link to this delicious looking thing: http://www.holytaco.com/if-i-die-bacon-related-death-id-it-be-because.
Since it looked so good, and I have no fear, we decided to give it a try. Here’s pictures of our progress:
