Concrete block walls in Wilmington NC - a wall that stands and drains right

Most folks call us when a slope keeps washing mud onto the patio, an old timber wall has started to lean, or they just want a solid wall built right the first time. The price moves with the wall's length and height, whether it holds back soil, how many cores get grouted and how much digging the footing takes, and the schedule turns mostly on any permit or review your address needs, the weather and how the dig goes. If your wall is mainly there to hold back a real grade change, our retaining wall construction page goes deeper into that side of it. Once I've seen the spot, I put the estimate in writing so you have your own figure in hand.

Here's the order we work in. We mark the wall out with you, then dig for the footing, the concrete base the wall sits on, down to firm undisturbed soil, and if the ground has been dug up or filled before, we pack it down first because a wall is only as steady as what's under it. If the wall holds back soil, I plan the drainage behind it before the first block goes down, since water building up back there is what pushes a wall out of line, and that usually means drains through the wall plus a drain along the back where long, heavy rains are expected. Then we lay the block around the steel and grout it to a plan set by where that steel goes. Some walls only need the cores holding steel filled, and others get every core filled, because when the bars sit close together or the wall has a lot of bond beams, reinforced rows of block, filling it solid is often quicker and cheaper than picking cores one at a time.

Block walls often tie into other work around the house. If the block is going under a house, an addition or a porch, that's foundation block wall installation, and we plan it as its own job. And if you're picturing a grill counter or a bar out back, the same block makes the frame for outdoor kitchen masonry, which we can face to match your house.

Before we dig, a few Wilmington checks shape how tall your wall can be and how it looks. The New Hanover County Department of Permits & Inspections issues building permits for structures inside Wilmington city limits, and whether your wall needs one is the county's call, so I tell you which office handles your address and we help you get the paperwork together before work starts. In the city's residential districts, walls, fences and screens in a front yard are limited to four feet, so we set a front-yard wall's height to fit that. If your house sits in one of Wilmington's local historic or overlay districts, changes to structures need a Certificate of Appropriateness, and I'll tell you up front whether that review could come into your job.

We're based in Wilmington and work across the cities around it. A lot of our block wall calls are backyard walls holding back a slope, low walls around a patio and walls that need to sit well next to an older brick house, and we build the same kinds of walls on jobs in Leland and Myrtle Grove.