Saturday, August 30, 2008

Boulder Wall

I have quite a few large boulders on my property, and am saving them for retaining walls etc. First thing to use them for, was to create a boulder wall near the property line. This wall has a few purposes:

1) To create a channel for keeping surface water away from my house. The land that the power lines are on, slopes towards my property, and I could see deep erosion channels, every foot or so, where water from up there flowed down to my property.

2) To create a raised berm, for planting some screening trees. Since the property line is about 12 feet higher than the garage floor height, it might seem somewhat counter-intuitive to raise this area up ever higher. This berm will give the trees more height, to screen the power lines better.

3) The boulder wall is landscaping. I think it looks pretty good. It will look much better when the area is completed, and the wall is one of a series of 3 stepped down retaining walls.

One worry, is that the wall is too close to the property line, and the power company will cut my trees. Also the boulder wall could have been curved as it got further away from the house, to give more space to the property line. But right now I'm leaving it up to Scott and his crew. His company does incredible work, and I know he has a great vision that I can't see now.

The wall took 3 days to build (Aug 28-29-30), 1 excavator and 1 laborer. It's about 150 feet long.

Photo Album of the Boulder Wall

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