Concrete retaining walls in Redding CA - a wall built to drain and stay put

Most calls start with a bank that slumps a little more every rainy season, a hillside you'd like to turn into flat ground for a patio, or an old wall that has started to lean. Besides the dirt, a wall can be holding back groundwater, the slope above it, earthquake shaking and the weight of cars or a building nearby, so it has to be built for what's actually behind it. The price mostly follows the wall's height and length, how involved the design is, how much digging and drainage the slope needs and how close we can get the truck. The schedule turns on whether a design and a permit come first, and on the concrete gaining enough strength before the soil goes back against it. Your estimate is written out so you can see what's included for your wall.

The first thing we look at is water, because water behind a wall does more damage than anything else, so the drainage gets as much care in our plan as the concrete. Next is height, since the height you need sets the kind of wall we quote. On the job we dig out for the footing, the wide base the wall stands on, then set the forms and tie in the rebar, the steel that keeps the wall from bending under the soil's push, and pour. Behind the wall we lay drain rock, filter fabric and a perforated pipe with somewhere to empty, so water has a way out instead of building up. We wait until the wall is strong enough to take the load before we backfill, and we pack the soil back in layers instead of piling it against new concrete all at once. If a budget gets tight, the drainage is the last thing I'd cut, because it's buried on day one and it's the part that decides whether the wall keeps standing.

A wall is often the first step on a sloped lot. Once the hill is held back, the level ground it leaves can take concrete pool decks or a new slab through our concrete floor installation work. We plan the drainage for both at once, so water running off the new concrete doesn't end up behind the wall.

Don't assume a retaining wall can go up without a permit. Inside Redding, the office for it may be the city or Shasta County's Department of Resource Management, so the first step is confirming which one covers your address. The county takes calls at (530) 225-5761, and its online permit portal lets you look up your parcel and offers limited building permits to licensed contractors and registered public users. When your wall needs a permit, we check whether your address falls under the city or the county and work through it with that office as part of the job.

A lot of the walls we're called about sit on sloped lots where a yard, a driveway or a house pad was cut into the hill, and many were never given a real way to drain. We see the same kind of lots on jobs in Shasta Lake and Happy Valley. If you're planning a driveway or a parking spot near the wall, tell us at the start, because added weight like that, or water left to build up behind it, can undo a design that was right for the yard it had.