Retaining Wall Repair and Rebuilds in Marion, IA
Cedar Rapids Retaining Walls repairs, rebuilds, and builds retaining walls in Marion, Iowa. We work segmental block, timber, boulder, and natural stone. We also correct wall drainage and terrace a slope into flat yard. Licensed and insured in Iowa.
Marion gives us two different jobs. Uptown Marion is the historic core, and Terrace Park sits on a knoll that early residents chose because it stood above the streets around it. The walls holding that high ground are old. Most predate the idea of putting a drain behind a wall. The other Marion is new. Tower Terrace Road, Armar Drive, and the Highway 13 corridor filled in with recent construction, and a machine cut those grades.
Old wall or new wall, water takes it down. Dry soil pushes, and a wall is built for that. Saturated soil pushes far harder, because the water adds its own pressure on top of the earth pressure. Eastern Iowa clay holds that water through the winter. It freezes, it swells, it thaws, and the wall walks out a fraction each cycle.
So we rebuild with a stone column. Clean angular drainage stone fills the space behind the block from the base to the top. A perforated pipe in a sock sits at the bottom of that stone and runs on a fall to daylight. Filter fabric keeps the clay out of the stone, so the stone still drains in twenty years. On the taller runs we lay Tensar UX geogrid between courses of Versa-Lok, back far enough that the wall and a wedge of the hill behave as one mass. The alternative is block dry-stacked on dirt with the clay packed straight against the back.
Your sound block comes back into the rebuild. Concrete units do not wear out.
Call (319) 555-0129 for a free estimate on retaining wall work in Marion.