When the tree fallers carted away all of that debris from our driveway recently, the center portion of the retaining wall in the driveway collapsed and was carted away as well. We quite literally pulled the remaining wall down with our hands, and then set to work making a new one.
Old retaining wall comes tumbling down
Cottager and I went over very early one Friday morning, but still arrived only about a half hour ahead of the delivery truck from the lumber yard.
Delivery truck, after grinding up the driveway
Besides a lot of hard digging, which I lent my expert supervision to, the tricky bit was getting the posts in just the right position. It turned out the old wall was rooted in concrete, so we had to put the new posts elsewhere. In the end, it took Cottager one whole day of hard work to get it all lined up for concreting. We got the concrete poured early next day, in about two hours, thanks to this handy little rolla-mixer from Lee Valley. Then we tidied up and left it to set up.
Great little system for mixing very small amounts of concrete
Hard part of the job is done.
Last weekend Cottager invited his ‘Fight Club’ buddies (they fight it out over Trivial Pursuit) out to the cottage for a bit of a retreat.
“Oh,” says he, ”And could you give me a hand with these giant, sixteen foot timbers, by the way?”
Fight Club crew gets the job done, alright!
In about two hours they had it all put together and backfilled, so they could get down to the serious business of board games and cold beer. Thanks for helping out guys!
Now we just have to fix the driveway that the truck made a mess of it whilst delivering the timbers to repair the wall that fell down when we had the tree fallers over. And so it goes.
Wall complete. Tick. What's next on the list?
