Retaining Walls Macarthur

Why Macarthur Owners Call Us for Retaining Walls

Ask three contractors for retaining walls in Macarthur and you may get three different answers. The difference usually comes down to whether anyone has looked at long travel distances between jobs that make scheduling part of the quote before pricing the job.

There is a pattern to retaining walls jobs in Macarthur, where the housing is largely a broad spread from 1970s estates to brand new growth-area release. A whole street tends to reach the same point at the same time.

The honest starting point for retaining walls in Macarthur is that you are dealing with gully systems and bushland reserve running behind whole streets. Everything we specify follows from working with that rather than pretending it is not there.

We are based at Wentworthville and cover Macarthur regularly. Call 0492 879 796 to book a site visit and a fixed written quote.

Materials, Fixings and Finishes

We specify to the site rather than to a price point. There are cheaper ways to build almost everything on this list, and most of them fail first where the ground is Bringelly shale clay across the plateau with alluvial ground in the valleys.

There is no premium in over-specifying something that was never going to fail. We put the money where Macarthur conditions actually attack the job, which is generally at ground level and at the fixings.

• Segmental block walls resist by mass and setback, and taller ones need geogrid reinforcement into the retained soil.
• Stepping a large level change into two terraces is often cheaper and always safer than one tall wall.
• A wall on reactive clay has to allow for the ground swelling behind it, not just the static soil load.
• A surcharge, meaning any load near the top of the wall such as a driveway, pool or structure, changes the design completely.
• Drainage behind a wall is aggregate, a geotextile separation layer and an agricultural line taken to a legal discharge point.

Council Controls Worth Checking First

Before anything is fabricated for a Macarthur property, we check what applies. Campbelltown City Council publishes its controls, and heritage, bushfire and flood mapping can each change the answer entirely.

Heritage conservation, bushfire prone land and flood planning levels all sit on top of the standard controls in parts of the Macarthur region. Any of the three can change what is permitted on a boundary.

Retaining Walls Configurations We Install

Why Macarthur Owners Replace Retaining Walls

We have been doing retaining walls across Macarthur long enough to know which streets throw up surprises. The one that catches people out most often is clay that behaves very differently on the ridge than in the valley.

• A level change that was filled rather than retained
• Water weeping through the face because there is no drainage behind it
• A wall that has begun to lean or bulge in the middle
• Timber sleepers that have rotted at the base course

Site Logistics in Macarthur

We agree the working hours and the access route with you at the start. On the tighter Macarthur streets that conversation saves a day, and it saves the relationship with the neighbours.

We work out where the truck parks, where the material lands and where the spoil goes before quoting. On ridge-and-gully country with large falls between adjoining properties, that is not a detail.