Concrete retaining walls in Ventura CA - a wall built around your slope and water

Most calls start with dirt creeping onto the patio, a bank too steep to use, or an old wall leaning out at the top, and often the goal is a flat spot for a concrete patio or a usable yard. The price mostly comes down to how tall and long the wall is, how much digging and drainage it needs, whether the layout curves and whether a pump truck can get close. The schedule turns on any permit review, the cure time and how long the soil has to wait before it goes back. Your own figure comes from seeing the site in person, because no two slopes carry the same soil or water.

A wall is only as good as the plan around it, so before the design is set I ask about the slope, where the water runs when it rains and anything heavy going in nearby, like a driveway, a pool or a shed. Then we mark the line, dig out for the footing, which is the wide concrete base the wall stands on, and set the rebar, the steel bars inside that give concrete strength it doesn't have on its own. We build the forms, pour the wall and put drainage in behind it so water has a way out instead of pressing on the concrete. After that comes curing, the time the concrete needs to gain strength, and we hold off on backfill, which is putting soil back behind the wall, until the wall is ready to carry it. If the budget gets tight, I'd rather spend it on the footing and drainage than on how the face looks, because nobody sees those once the dirt's back and they're what keeps the wall standing.

A wall usually makes room for something else. Once the slope is held back, that level ground is often where a concrete pool deck goes, or a shed or workshop that needs concrete floor installation. If either one is in your plans, tell me before the wall is designed so it's built for that weight from the start.

Here in Ventura, digging out or bringing in fill brings in the city. The City of Ventura requires grading plans and a permit for earthwork that involves excavation, fill or both, and it has special requirements for grading on hillside lots, so if your yard sits on a hill, that belongs in our first conversation. The county also keeps a map of areas where liquefaction and landslides may happen in a strong earthquake, liquefaction being wet ground that turns soft when it shakes, and properties in those zones may be required to study the hazard and reduce it as part of local permitting. When a job needs a permit, I figure out which city or county office covers your address and take care of the paperwork with them, and the wall gets planned around whatever the site turns up.

We're based in Ventura and work across the cities around it. On hillside jobs the first things I look at are whether a pump truck can get near the wall and where the runoff from up the slope ends up. We see the same steep back yards on jobs in Ojai and Santa Paula.