Foundation block wall installation in Clovis CA - a wall built to hold back the soil

You're usually here because you're adding a room, building over a crawlspace or putting a basement under new work, and you want to know what the wall will take before anyone starts digging. If you've got an older wall that's cracking or leaning, that's foundation repair, which is a different job. On a new wall, the price moves with its length and height, with how much soil it holds back, since that decides how much steel and grout go in, with how firm the ground is where the footing sits and with what it takes to keep water off it. The schedule mostly turns on the digging and on what we find once the ground is open, so I'd rather see your lot than guess, and the estimate I write there gives you the figure for your wall.

I start by digging out for the footing and looking hard at what's underneath, because masonry industry guidance puts footings on undisturbed native soil, the ground nobody has dug up or filled before. If we hit soil that's soft or weak, it comes out and gets replaced with compacted soil, gravel or concrete, which adds digging but beats a footing that settles. While we're at it, I'll talk with you about how your lot drains, since keeping water off the wall matters as much as the block does. Then our crew lays the block, puts steel and grout where your wall's design calls for them and coats the soil side to keep water out. The wall gets braced before any soil goes back against it, because a wall that's meant to be held at the top by the floor can crack or even fail if it has to take that push on its own.

Once the wall's in and the ground is graded back around the house, a lot of folks want a new walkway along that side, and it's worth building it with the same fall away from the house so it doesn't send water back at the wall. Some go further and add an outdoor kitchen on the patio, and we build those with the same care for the block and the mortar.

The Clovis building department lays out how the ground around a foundation should be finished. It wants the ground to slope 5% away from the foundation for the first 10 feet, which is about six inches of fall, and where a lot line or something in the way leaves less room than that, the ground slopes 2% into swales, the shallow ditches that carry water off, or into drain inlets. That shapes how high the top of your wall sits and how the yard gets graded once it's built, so I plan the two together at the estimate and we leave the ground ready to fall away the way the city wants.

On jobs around here we see a lot of crawlspace houses, additions and lots that look flat until you watch where the sprinklers and downspouts send their water. It's the same story on jobs in Sanger and Madera, so that walk around the yard is part of every estimate.