Retaining Walls in Dallas-Fort Worth

Retaining walls in Dallas-Fort Worth run $35 to $95 per square foot of wall face. Wall face means the height times the length, so the surface you actually see. Most home walls land between $5,000 and $28,000. Taller engineered walls and natural stone walls cost more.

A 40 foot wall that is 3 feet tall has 120 square feet of face, so roughly $5,400 to $7,800 in block. The same wall at 5 feet tall needs an engineer and roughly doubles, because of the extra reinforcement and design work.

Almost never because of the blocks. Walls here fail for three reasons, and all three are hidden once the wall is finished.

• Water trapped behind the wall. Wet clay pushes hard. With nowhere for that water to go, the pressure builds until the wall bulges, leans, or pulls apart at the joints. This is the most common cause of failure around here.
• No reinforcement into the slope. Above about 3 feet, a wall cannot hold on its own weight. It needs geogrid, a strong fabric laid back into the soil in layers that ties the wall into the hillside. Leaving it out looks fine on day one and shows up by year three.
• A weak base. A packed gravel base is what keeps the wall from settling unevenly. Build straight on our clay, which shrinks in August and swells in May, and the wall moves right along with it.

The clay is the real problem. The black clay soil across Dallas, Collin, and Denton counties swells a lot when it gets wet and shrinks when it dries out. A wall built without planning for that is fighting the ground itself.

Every wall we build includes the parts you will never see.

• Digging down to solid, undisturbed ground
• A packed crushed stone base, leveled and checked
• Clean washed stone behind the whole wall face, never clay pushed back in
• A drain pipe at the base that runs out to open ground where water can escape
• Geogrid layers tying the wall back into the slope on anything over 3 feet
• Fabric between the drainage stone and the soil so it does not clog over time
• Packing the soil in layers as the wall goes up, not all at once at the end
• Cap stones set and glued down

In most Dallas-Fort Worth cities, a wall over 4 feet tall needs a permit and a design stamped by a licensed engineer. That height is measured from the bottom of the footing, not from the ground you stand on. Stacked walls can trigger the same requirement even when each one is shorter, because the upper wall pushes on the lower one.

Some contractors propose two 3 foot walls to avoid the engineering. With enough space between them that is a fair design. Done just to dodge a permit, you get two walls acting like one tall one without the reinforcement a tall wall needs. Ask which one you are being sold.

We handle the permit and bring in the engineer when your wall needs one.

Block is the workhorse. It comes in a range of colors and textures, the units lock together, and it has a long track record in our soil. Best value for most projects.

Natural stone costs more and takes longer, but nothing else looks like it. It suits older properties in Highland Park, University Park, and Preston Hollow, where new looking block would stand out.

Boulder walls work on bigger lots where the scale fits. We build them most often on acreage in Prosper, Celina, and around The Colony.

Concrete with stone facing is the answer when the span or the load is more than block can handle, or when the wall also has to hold up a patio or pool above it.

A retaining wall changes how water moves across your property. Handled well, that is an opportunity. The same digging that builds the wall can pick up downspouts, catch water running across the yard, and send it away from your foundation.

Handled badly, the wall becomes a dam. We design the wall and the drainage together, because on a clay lot they are one problem.

We build retaining walls across Dallas-Fort Worth, mostly where there is real slope to deal with. That means Bluffview and the Bachman Branch area, the sloped lots in The Colony along Lewisville Lake, and the larger properties in Prosper, Westlake, and Colleyville.