Concrete retaining walls in Beaumont TX - a wall that holds your slope and drains

Usually the slope is already moving, washing onto a patio or a drive after every storm, or you want a flat spot where there's a hill. The price turns on the wall's height and length, how deep we have to dig, whether an old wall comes out first, and whether you want it straight or curved, terraced, stamped or stained. The schedule turns on what the permit office asks for, the weather and curing, which is the days the concrete needs to gain strength before dirt goes against it, and you'll get your own price in writing once I've walked the slope.

I start by walking the slope with you to see where the water comes from and where it can go, because a wall with nowhere for water to go is just a dam with a mortgage. We dig down to firm ground, pour the footing, which is the wide base the wall stands on, and tie in rebar, the steel that holds the concrete together when the dirt leans on it, before we form and pour the wall. Once it has cured enough to take the load, we lay filter fabric, run a perforated drain pipe along the bottom and pack gravel behind it in layers, not the clay we dug out. What's behind a retaining wall matters as much as the wall, so the drainage and gravel backfill are spelled out in your estimate. That's also the part people want to trim first, since nobody sees it, and I'd rather cut a decorative finish than cut the gravel, because the face is for looks and the drain is what the wall lives on. If a driveway or a watered flower bed is going near the wall, tell us early, because that changes the plan.

A wall usually comes with other work, since the point of holding a slope back is often to make flat ground. If you're leveling a spot for a shop or a room, we can follow the wall with concrete floor installation, and a wall that cuts a terrace beside the pool sets up a level edge for one of our concrete pool decks.

The soil mapped across this area is the Beaumont series, a very deep, poorly drained clay that lets water through very slowly and sits on nearly flat coastal plain. Your lot may differ, but that's the ground we plan for, so the gravel and drain behind a wall do more work here than they would on sandy ground. When this clay dries out it opens wide, deep cracks, and clay that swells adds its own push against a wall that can bend it further. We plan for the same heavy ground on jobs in Nederland and Port Neches.

Inside city limits, the city's Building Codes program reviews site plans before it issues building permits, and nothing we've found settles whether your wall needs one, so we look up what the office asks for at your address and tell you what we found. When the permit is ours to hold, we handle the paperwork and book the inspections, which the permit holder schedules through the city's online portal, since the city doesn't book any by phone. In unincorporated Jefferson County, the county's Environmental Control office requires owners to contact it before any development, and that includes digging, grading, filling and new structures, so tell us whether your lot is inside the city when you call. We're based in Beaumont and work in the cities around it, so if you're out in the county and not sure we reach you, call and ask.