Yard retaining wall (phase 1)

Following the decorators' maxim of 'so much more preparation, so much the better', the first phase of yard retaining wall reconstruction was completed yesterday.

Started by going through all the same palaver as last time, pondering on cubic metres and the difference in cost between buying aggregate in small bags (25kg) and getting one big bag (1000kg). The estimate was that I needed about a third of a cubic metre of concrete. The man at Jewson's says small bags better. Partly because you don't need anything like as much as a big bag, partly because small bags are sale or return and partly because you can do small bags in your car and save the £20 delivery. The two computer sums sites that I tried suggested that I might easily need half rather than a third a cubic metre. So the bottom line was, big bag might be marginally dearer but I would not need to mess up the car and I would not need to rush out for more stuff half way through as the big bag would certainly be enough. As it turned out, the big bag of aggregate, 6 for the price of 5 bags of cement (which have lost their French flavour since last time) and delivery came to just about £100.

The industrious preparation was mainly a response to the rather dodgy concreting of last year, on which occasion I had failed to take adequate account of the weight of wet concrete and its consequential habit of pushing feeble shuttering aside (see 27th May 2013 for the more successful part of that endeavour). But it worked, and there was no movement yesterday - although we have yet to strike the shutters and take a peek at the finished concrete: let's hope there is a nice clean finish without last year's voids.

The wall is a brick's width, just over 4 inches, at the top and about double that at the base, with the left hand face in the illustration vertical and the right hand face dug into the clay. Vaguely the section of a dam.

So far, about half a day to take down a section of old wall, a whole day spread over two days to build two shutters (only one of which was used for phase 1 - I was not sure how much concrete mixing I was good for at one go) and half a day to mix and lay the concrete itself. If I move up to two shutters, there will be two more phases and I should be finished before the end of the month; plenty of time for it to settle down before the winter frosts.

The earth at top of the illustration, the earth cut away from the bank can easily be lost, which means that the only outstanding decision is deciding what to do with the old bricks. So far they have been added to the invertebrate sanctuary at the bottom of the garden, that is to say the small ivy covered mound of rubble on the way to the compost bin, but there may be pressure to bag some of the rest of it up and take it down to the waste transfer station down the road.