wall repair

[walls]

This is a tricky one I think.

I have a garden wall (about 5 ft)which has the soil banked up on the neighbours side by the previous owners. The wall has been fine until this year where it has bowed and has quite a bit of lean on it. We were planning to build raised beds against the wall our side so should support the bottom 2ft but I think the upper wall needs to be repaired and correct the lean.

There is a buttress along part of the wall so most of the wall is straight, the affected part is only 9 bricks long at the end of the garden which meets at large stone back wall. Obviously i can't remove all of the wall to the foundation and start again as the neighbours garden will comically fall into mine. What is the best way to go about this then. Can I remove the bowing part to the wall 2 ft from the ground, correct the lean with a mortar bed and build on top of this? Any better way to go about this?

 

[noseall]

Sounds to me like the wall is woefully inadequate and that you need a new wall + foundation built to a decent spec'. "Correcting" the wall as you describe will only add more stress.

You could take measures to prevent further problems by building more buttresses, ugly but effective, but why bother.


Have you asked the neighbours to remove the soil or is the geography such that their ground level is higher than yours?

 

[walls]

The wall isn't suitable at all. I think with all this rain in the last couple of years it has added a much greater weight against the wall. Looking at it tonight, there is a bow in the bottom, and the bricks are very wet.

Most of their garden is around 3ft higher than ours but this is fairly recent I think - the last 5 years or so. The problem is, to excavate their side would be a ballache but I recognise, to truly sort the issue this may need to be done. We have a decent relationship with the neighbours and it's not really their fault so my feeling is, if we can stop it moving, repoint, I am not too bothered about a wonky wall as it's at the bottom of the garden. I just don't want the wall to collapse. I was thinking about creating some weep holes - just drilling through the wall and back filling their side at intervals with some rubble to remove the water pressure, which must be huge, then go from there.

 

[^woody^]

Weep holes wont help - it wont have anything to do with water pressure unless its a swimming pool.

The foundations and/or bottom part of the wall have gone and no repointing will help either.

You need to stop the movement, as it will not be getting any better