Retaining Walls - Allegheny County
Shaler is hillside township north of the city - Glenshaw and the surrounding communities - where lots run narrow and back straight into the slope. That produces tall, short-run walls close behind houses, often with very little room to work between the wall and the building. Access is regularly the deciding factor in how a Shaler wall gets built, not the wall design itself.
Shaler Township covers Glenshaw and the communities around it, north of the city along the Route 8 corridor. The characteristic lot here is narrow and backs straight into the hillside, which produces a very particular wall: tall for its length, close behind the house, and with almost no working room between the two.
More than anywhere else we work, the wall design is not what decides the job. Access does.
Restricted access regularly means smaller equipment, staged work, or material barrowed in by hand. That costs more, and we would rather put it in the estimate than discover it on the first morning. Getting to the wall line is frequently a larger part of the price than the wall itself.
When a retaining wall sits a few feet from the house, the excavation has to be sequenced so the foundation is never undermined, and the drainage has to move water away from both the wall and the building. It is the detail we are most careful about in this township.
Height and proximity mean reinforced concrete comes up more often here than in the suburbs, though block still covers most new work where there is room behind it. Wooded rear boundaries take boulder, older frontages stone, and leaning walls a diagnosis first.
Retaining wall work across Allegheny, Butler and Washington counties:
Free - No Obligation
Send a few details and we'll come look at it. Photos help - a picture of a lean or a crack tells us more than a paragraph.