The weirdest fix I ever did

When I think of the weirdest fix I have ever done, one and one only, springs to mind.

First you need some technical knowledge.

When you are building a raised patio (that is a patio that is not flush with the ground but raised up), you are supposed to put a retaining wall all the way around it, so the patio is self supporting. Most landscape contractors do this not halfheartedly, but about 75% hearted. They cheat.

They build a wall around the three outwards facing sides and use the foundation wall as the fourth wall. Now this is not good, because the wall then has to support the weight of the patio and, (this is important) it cannot breathe. Walls need to breathe. They also don’t like having damp gravel right up against them. It makes them nervous.

It makes them sweat.

Anyways, now you know that there should be a wall there to support the patio and keep the wall fresh and clean and airy.

But there usually isn’t.

I was called in to fix a patio that had issues. The main issue was that the original contractor had done something funky with the retaining wall against the house. He had built one, but then stuffed it full of stone dust.

Stone dust is a kind of crushed limestone that holds so much water you can use it as a reservoir. (You can’t actually, that was a joke). It is NOT the material to stuff between a retaining wall and and a foundation wall. There was water oozing into the basement from the foundation wall. That water was from the patio, specifically, the stone dust stuffings.

So I was called in to rectify the problem.

I hoped that I would be able to dig the stone dust out without tearing the wall down completely. But upon digging down a couple of feet we discovered the real problem.

The wall had been put in backwards.

Retaining walls lock together in such a way that they can hold the weight of whatever they are retaining. The thing this landscape master must have forgotten (yes, dear Reader, that was sarcasm), is that the wall is uni-directional. It only retains things one way. It was retaining nothing.

Imagine if the guy who made your sunglasses put the lenses in backwards. They would catch the glare from your eyeballs and prevent the light in your eyes from hitting the sun. That is ridiculous.

That makes no sense.

And that is what he did. He had the entire six foot high, twenty foot wall installed backwards, retaining nothing.

What a joke!

We had to dig down six feet and pull the wall out piece by piece by piece

That was loads of fun.

But it looked nice when I was finished with it.