Hiking Oregon: Retaining Sanity

Sometimes, during these covid lockdown times, you just need a few projects around the yard to maintain your mental balance. My lovely partner has taught me the calming and fulfilling feelings that can come from the building of a simple retaining wall. We started a few years ago down in the back corner of our lot where our property inclines quite a bit into our neighbors. The previous owners had put in some old cinderblocks and a wire fence and that had stopped the slide, but we wanted to add more of a terraced feeling, so we could generate some flat areas for yard, patio, and planting. This led directly to our first retaining wall, that was very much a combined project between she and I. She taught me the importance or area preparation, of digging down far enough to have a few inches of crushed gravel to provide for support, drainage, and a good level starting point. I, of course, was more concerned with getting the blocks laid and so didn't really follow her directives for the first half of the wall. This led not only to scorn but a redo of that half of the wall. Let me just say, the more walls you build the more you appreciate the importance of quarter minus and a good tamper.

After the first couple of years you get that nice moss covering

Jack wants to make sure you see the nice steps in our garden path.

Well, once that wall was done, I realized that we really needed another one 10 feet away to finish the terracing and give us the perfect patio area. My partner agreed, but she didn't want any straight line wall, those are ugly and boring. She laid out a nice curved pattern that matched her ideas about path construction and plant placement and I went at it. This one had the extra fun building aspects of going up and down in the yard. This means that the top row is even and level, but the bottom rows go up and down a brick or so (you could just dig extra deep in some places and have bricks that are completely buried, but that seems like a waste of brick money and digging effort). We were pretty happy with it when we finished, though we still are not sure whether we want it to be a brick layer taller or not. And we still don't have a patio...

We planted a wild mix flower lawn this year. Jack likes it.

8 inch Roman Stackers and fluer de lawn.

I should say a little something about the stones being used. These two walls both used 8 inch roman stackers from Home Depot. They are 8 inches in the front, 6 inches in the back, and 4 inches tall. The main body stones have groves in the bottom and a rise in the top. The rise and grove fit together to lock the stones horizontally whilst still allowing for the stones to be turned to follow the graceful curves you can see in the pictures. The cap stones a flat on top.

We didn't build this wall all at once. It was a many weekend (when we were not kayaking or hiking or otherwise adventuring) activity. We pretty much would build it by the car load. That is, we would take our Hippo (the Nissan Pathfinder) that we had back then to Home Depot and get as many stones as we thought we could move at a time. This was a limit for the hippo, but also for our poor backs. We would get maybe 40 stones at a time (Paige will check me on this). That is a lot of exercise, by the way, since you need to load the stones on the hand truck, wheel them out to the car, load them into the car, unload them back into the garden cart, and then wheel them back to the project and unload them again. Such fun.

The next project was more of a "save the yard" then a beauty thing. We wanted to build a shed but we really needed to stabilize that side of the yard first. So we used larger heavier stones to make a retaining wall between the neighbors and us. We think the chainlink fence may be ours, but it is unclear. When we built this, there was a very high dense loral hedge growing down the property line. This one was tough because our build space was limited by the hedge and fence and the stones weighed twice as much. Of course, I didn't care quite as much about keeping things level either.

Jack thinks he may see an old tennis ball of his

Then. Some excitement. Last year I convinced my partner that we needed a wall in the front yard to level off that side garden and provide more definition for the grass area. She somewhat reluctantly agreed and I got to put in this fine baby.

See the up and down there on the bottom?

Not to be outdone, my partner put a wall in place over by the driveway, to hold our new parking space that we had then thought would hold our new RV Trailer.

This brings us up to Covid Times. Here we were, trapped in the house with nothing to do and no where to go and with a couple of wall projects that were just begging to be completed. I wanted to put in another wall in the back yard that would compliment the ones in place but would level off the area over by my bamboo. I also wanted to put in a new Giant Bamboo planter back in the far corner (where the big block wall is). And while were are at it, I really want to retain the wall between our up hill neighbors house and our property. That is a lot of bricks. And the stores are NOT open.
So I ordered a pallet of 2 different size bricks from Home Depot and had it delivered. If you are ordering a bunch of heavy things, this is definitely the way to go. Price is like $80 for the entire pallet, so just load it up.