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Today we bit the bullet…   and started planning the last section of the retaining walls that will protect the house hill.

We had put this off for a while as we had other priorities and we also knew how hard this last bit was going to be.

We needed an excavator to do the final post holes, and we had already had a go at the post holes with another excavator(with auger) and only had some success – due to the hardness of the ground and the inadequacy of the auger.

 

So we set out the plan for the new wall and had to decide how much excavation we were going to undertake.

You can see in the images, it is dry and there is not a lot of vegetation on the hill we are working on.  This is one of the things we had to consider, as the hill would most likely “move downhill” when the next rain arrives.

As you may have seen…  we don’t build straight walls.  We build the walls to fit with the landscape, or we would have to excavate metres and metres of earth to get the wall to “look pretty”.

This new wall was also going to move with the shape of the hill.

So with string lines in place as a guide, we set out the area of excavation and re-marked the postholes so we could find them again when we excavated.

Planning the last wall - North Face

Planning the last wall - North Face

Our aim is to not remove any earth from the hill if we can avoid it.  All debris and soil would end up back behind the wall or as a new topsoil coat on the Dragonfruit level.

We are unsure how much earth we will have spare, but the plan is to have very little that needed to be moved elsewhere.

..and so we are ready.  Excavator comes tomorrow and we will be underway and close to finishing all major walls.

Planning the last wall - North Face
Dave

Dave

Dave

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