Retaining wall drainage

[guyank]

Hi all,

I have quite a serious problem with a retaining wall in the house that we need to moved into in August. Clearly the wall needs to come down and be replaced sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, I can't really afford to do this at the moment. We're planning on an extension in the next couple of year in which case it'll have to come down anyway.

What can I do to try and maximise its life? There is no drainage in it at all and considering it holds back to whole garden, means that not only is there a lot of pressure on it, the whole garden is always wet. I have huge problems with moss growing everywhere. The only way that water seems to be able to escape is running between the gaps in the caps on the top of the wall.

Thanks

Guyan
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[r896neo]

its a fair bit of digging but the only thing you can do that will be helpful is to remove all the soil about 1 foot back to expose the back of the wall.

Dig this down as far as you can and the fill it back in with clean stone and drill some weep holes from the front which terminate into your clean stone.

 

[guyank]

Thanks for that. I've been doing a fair bit of looking into this (using Google) and do you think that just digging a post hole where I'm going to put the weep holes would do it, rather than digging out all the soil? It's a lot of soil to remove otherwise.

 

[r896neo]

It will certainly be a big improvment on what you have currently but the proper way to do it would be having a constant band of clean stone, its up to you at the end of the day