Retaining Walls in Mount Sheridan

Mount Sheridan filled out through the nineties and 2000s with estate housing on blocks that were cut and filled to produce level building pads. Where a pad meets the neighbouring pad at a different level, something has to hold the difference, and that is where most of the retaining in this suburb sits.

Walls that are somebody else’s business too

The defining local feature is that a large proportion of walls here are on or very near a boundary, and often they retain one property’s ground while standing on or beside another’s.

That makes them a legal question as well as a structural one. Who is responsible for a wall that supports a neighbour’s soil, who pays when it needs replacing, and what a neighbour is entitled to be told before work starts are all questions with real answers, and they are not the same answers as for a dividing fence. The wall being on the boundary does not automatically make it shared, and the party who benefits is not always the party who owns it.

We have written up what generally applies in retaining walls on a boundary. The practical advice for this suburb is to sort that out before booking work, because a wall replacement that starts with an unhappy neighbour is a much worse job than one that starts with an agreement.

Estate cut-and-fill, twenty-five years on

The original earthworks here are now old enough to be showing what they are made of.

On the cut side, the ground is generally competent. On the fill side, it depends entirely on how well the fill was placed and compacted at the time, and standards varied. Walls founded in fill that was not properly compacted settle, and a wall that has dropped at one end while staying true at the other is telling you about the ground rather than the wall.

The original walls themselves are typically timber sleeper or early concrete sleeper systems at modest heights, and the timber ones are now reaching the end of their service life. Post failure at ground line and termite damage are the usual findings.

Access is the constraint

Estate blocks are efficiently sized, which means side setbacks are narrow, houses sit close to boundaries, and getting a machine to a rear boundary wall frequently means going through a gate, past a house, and around a pool or an air conditioning unit.

That decides a great deal about cost and method. Where machine access is genuinely impossible, work goes to smaller plant or to hand, and the difference is substantial. It is the first thing worth checking, and a photo of the side access is one of the more useful things you can send us.

Ring 0468 066 055 with the wall’s height and a picture of how we would get to it.