Gardens on a slope have retaining walls, and retaining walls fail in spring rather than in the middle of winter. The damage is done over months of saturated ground and freezing, and it shows itself in March when somebody notices the wall is leaning further than it was. A retaining wall rebuild produces one of the heaviest domestic loads we handle. Our Coppull skip hire service covers a fair amount of this work.
Walls fail from behind, not from the front
This is the thing worth understanding before you rebuild, because if you do not, you will be doing it again.
A retaining wall is holding back ground, and wet ground is far heavier and far more mobile than dry ground. If water cannot escape from behind the wall, it builds up, and the pressure it exerts is considerable. Add a winter of freezing and thawing in that saturated backfill and the wall gets pushed forward a fraction at a time.
So when a wall bulges, leans or the mortar joints open up, the wall itself is rarely the problem. The drainage behind it is. Around Coppull the ground is heavy and holds water for a long time after rain, which is exactly the condition that kills retaining walls.
A rebuilt wall with the same absent drainage will fail the same way. A drainage layer of clean stone behind the wall, a pipe at the base taking water somewhere useful, and weep holes through the face are what make the difference, and they cost very little compared with building it twice.
Know when it stops being a garden job
Low walls holding back a modest change in level are ordinary garden work. Once a retaining wall gets to any real height, or is holding back ground that supports something else such as a driveway, a building or a neighbour’s garden, it becomes a structural matter and wants designing properly.
We are not engineers and we are not going to tell you where your particular wall sits on that scale. What we would say is that if the wall is holding up ground that anything is standing on, get advice before you take it down rather than after. Removing a retaining wall releases whatever it was holding, and that happens quickly.
What comes out and what it weighs
Everything about this job is dense. Blockwork or brick from the wall itself, the concrete footing, and usually a quantity of the saturated backfill that comes away with it.
The backfill is the part people forget. Wet clay and stone that has been sitting behind a wall for years is as heavy as material gets, and once the wall is down a fair amount of it has to come out to allow the new drainage layer to go in. Our page on skip size versus weight limits explains why weight rather than volume decides your skip, and our guide to how full can you fill a skip with soil covers the soil element specifically.
Where the wall is timber sleepers rather than masonry, the load is different. Sleepers rot at the bottom first, they are treated, and treated timber should not be burned. They are also heavy and awkward, and old sleepers frequently have substantial steel spikes or reinforcement bar through them that needs dealing with rather than being thrown loose into a container.
Sizing it sensibly
The temptation on a job producing this much material is to order the largest container available. For heavy inert waste that is the wrong instinct, because the weight limit is reached long before the volume is used and you end up with a container that cannot legally be lifted.
A 4 tonne midi skip exchanged two or three times moves more material than one oversized container. Where the job also involves lighter waste such as old fencing, planting or timber, an 8 tonne builders skip for that element separately is often the tidier arrangement.
Keep the masonry and concrete clean. Broken block, brick and concrete crush down and go back into use, and our environmental and recycling page explains what happens once a clean load reaches our site. Mixed with soil, membrane and timber it becomes general waste.
If you need clean stone or soil bringing back in for the rebuild, we can deliver that on the same run rather than as a separate trip.
Access and where the skip goes
Sloping sites are awkward for skips by definition. The wall is usually at the bottom or the top of a garden and the skip has to go on the drive, which means barrowing heavy material up or down a gradient.
Plan the route and board it. Wet ground in March under a loaded barrow makes a mess of a lawn very quickly, and a board run costs ten minutes. Where the drive itself is on a slope, mention it when you book so the driver knows what to expect.
Where the skip has to go on the road, Lancashire County Council acts as highway authority at £36 per month, covered in our guide on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire.
Local coverage
We cover this area regularly, running Chorley skip hire and Charnock Richard skip hire jobs alongside Coppull.
Ring us on 01257 752399 with the length and height of the wall and we will tell you what to expect. Our contact page is there if you would rather send a photograph of it.
