Building a Happy Home: A retaining wall

Well, the weekend is halfway over with here and I'm sitting in our lounge thinking about all the things I still need to do tomorrow. This is what my life is most of the time...oh well! But our project to share right now is one my husband has been pondering for quite awhile. Here's the deal, we live in a valley and when we get a really bad rain, well, our property floods.

Since the bad floods in December 2011, Jeff has been figuring out what kind of wall he wants to put up around the property. Recently he got started on it.

 Our current fence around the property. It does a pretty good job keeping the dog in the property, but the water finds it's own way on.

 First Jeff dug down to even out the land.

 He then used plastic sheeting to create a water barrier and large foil bags filled with gravel to build the wall.

 Stacking the bags like bricks creates a pretty solid wall.

 Today Jeff went and got a load of rocks from the quarry today so he could face the wall.

 Building the stone part of the wall is going to take awhile. Compost is on top so we can grow wildflowers on top.

 Jeff is building a wooden fence to go on top of the wall in order to keep the dog on the property.

 All of these bricks were buried under the dirt by the compost bins. We have no idea why.

My clever husband working hard to improve our house. The wall is going to look great when it is done, but it's going to take a long time! I'll update again when we have some more of the wall done.