Before we built our house our lot was a rock field, but it was a low spot in the neighborhood so more rock was brought in to build it up. So the first couple of years we spent removing all the large rock off the top of our yard so it wasn't so hard, and uneven. Then we had to figure out what to do with the back property line where there was a 6 foot difference. The city should have taken care of it with a retaining wall but they refuse so it was left to us. After saving for a couple of years we decided to do a railroad tie retaining wall.

Brigham's brothers agreed to help out one morning to get the wall built. first they had to move all the ties out of the way, I think they were tired already...there was over 100.
We got a backhoe to help with some of the work. We dug out the little hill to make a two tiered wall for half of it the other half would be straight up.

Here is the beginning of the wall. It was very time consuming to line it up, drill the holes (with a weak drill) and then hammer rebar through it for support.


Half way through starting to fill in behind the wall...this will haunt us later.

Here is the tiered side of the wall...it has been a long day for these boys, in the middle of hot July besides all the labor.

From sunrise to sunset, but not done yet...Still not bad for one days work.

Here is the wall once it was finished.

The tall part (behind the trailer) started to lean a little after filling in behind it the force of the load from the backhoe and all the rock was just too much...over the next couple of months it continued to lean more and more and by Spring we knew we had to fix it :(

Here is the wall after we started taking it down...it was almost as hard to take down as it was to put up...prying the ties apart then hammering the rebar back out, it was a pain...poor Brigham did it mostly himself.

You can see the leaning here but it wasn't half as bad as the tall part.

This time we put support ties in front of the wall to keep it in place, cemented into the ground. After we finished building the wall...again...we had to dig out behind it about a foot wide and 3 feet deep so we could put a barrier behind it so the chemicals wouldn't seep into the garden...then we had to fill it back in. But finally the wall was done we could start working on the back yard.