ruskent

Well it looks like we are going with a concrete wall. Customer wants stone to match house. I will met with my engineer this week to get a accurate drawing for the wall done.

Basically I loose the wall portion of the job. BUT it seems that I will do the excavation and lay out. The concrete guy will come in and pour the walls. I will then do all cmu work for steps (and there are alot), bbq, pillars, seat walls etc. I will handle all backfilling. The company doing the stone and stucco on the house will do the cultured stone on the walls and pillars.

Overall I am happy. The finsh product will look much more high end. In the end its still my design, and my name on the finshed product.

I think I might have 10 days worth of labor less on this project now. So I am not loosing all that much money.

ruskent

I picked up the stamped plans today. Engineer speced a 10" thick wall. Footing size range from 3' 6" wide to 8' 6" wide.

I am curious to see what the poured wall guy comes in at for a price.

Tscarborough

The problem with a poured wall is that if there is a problem, no matter how small it is, the wall is toast eventually.

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ruskent

Things are not much better with a SRW if there is a failure.

The walls might come in way over budget now, who knows.

Tscarborough

It only costs labor to repair an SRW wall.

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It ain't Rocket Science unless you are building rockets.

ruskent

Now we have another twist. The basement contractor does not have forms to do curves. How rare is it to find a guy with curved forms? Or is the only way to do this framing your own forms?


Is using cmu block a worth wild thing to look into if the customer has to have masonary walls?

Tscarborough

What forming system is he using? Pretty much all of the modular forming systems I know of work just fine on curved walls on anything over about a 4' radius.

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Joe71

I have a related question. I have a retaining wall to build alongside an existing garage. The new wall will be 4ft from the existing foundation wall and is to be attached to it. The ground slopes down at about 30 degrees. This makes the new wall about 10ft high at the low end and 2ft high at the higher elevation end.

On the 10ft end, the wall runs into and connects into an existing vertical concrete wall (using wedge anchors every foot with attached rebar). On top of this new retaining wall, we will pour a 4ft wide sidewalk the 30ft along the top of the wall and alongside the old garage. The sidewalk is to be attached (again using wedge anchors) into the existing foundation wall. So.. What I will end up with is a concrete BOX, closed on all sides including the top.

The engineer has presented me with a plan for the wall which includes a 10" thick wall with TWO layers of rebar (cage) for ALL the footings plus, all the wall higher than 7ft is shown with the same TWO layers of #4 rebar. The footings for the 7, 8, 9 and 10ft sections are shown as 7.5ft wide with the double rebar cage.

I am thinking that my wall is "restrained" on all sides as opposed to freestanding and needs no such reinforcement in either the footings or the wall itself. In the past, I have built such restrained walls with a single layer of #4 rebar in 3ft wide x 1ft thick footings and a single layer of 18" OC rebar in 8" thick walls.

Is this engineer just "over designing" or is there some new code that requires all this extra steel?

Thanks.

4th generation

So based upon a few lines that you wrote, we are supposed to second guess your engineer who has all the details and information and has probably visited the site? If you dont like his design then hire another engineer to have a go at it.

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4th gen

Joe71

Well.. I think you are right about getting another engineer. The lady never visited the site, just took the phone explanation from my wall guy and sent over a plan. I think she sent me a "cover your ass, fail safe" wall design which took into account none of the actual site conditions.

But.. Before I hired another engineer, I was hoping some KNOWLEDGABLE person would give me an opinion (as opposed to a smarty answer). But perhaps I am in the wrong forum.

jgray152

You pay for me and my crews flight, room and time and I will help teach you our technique by pouring a concrete retainer wall carved and colored into stone. A lot more durable than cultured stone pasted onto a concrete wall as the faux rock is the concrete wall.

I wish I could find the 6' high wall we did. I'll find images