Massachusetts · Rhode Island · Connecticut · New Hampshire · Maine
Block and natural stone, drained behind and footed below the frost line.
Price your project →Saturated soil expands about nine percent when it freezes, and it expands against whatever will not move. That is the wall. Clean stone behind it, separated from the soil by fabric, and a pipe running out to daylight — so there is nothing back there to freeze.
A footing poured above frost depth rises with the ground every winter and settles differently every spring. The crack usually appears in the third year, which is long enough that nobody connects it to the footing.
A wall built plumb is already leaning forward as far as it will ever be allowed to. Set back into the hill, each course behind the one below, so the soil load pushes it into itself rather than away.
Past a certain height a wall stops being a wall and becomes a reinforced soil mass — layers of grid tied into the fill behind. Height, slope and what sits above it decide where that line falls, and it is worth being told before the block is chosen.
Every wall and patio we have taken apart failed for one of these five reasons. They are most of what separates a job that looks right at twenty years from one that does not make five.
Compacted gravel, deep enough for the ground it sits in. Every course above copies the first one, and so does every mistake in it.
New England ground moves in winter. A footing poured above the frost line lifts with it, and the wall on top of it cracks — not that winter, usually the third one.
Saturated soil expands about nine percent when it freezes, against something that cannot move. Clean stone, fabric, and a pipe run out to daylight.
A tooled joint sheds water off the face of the stone. A joint struck flush holds it there, and held water is what freezes.
The top takes the weather and everything anyone sets on it. Pitched away, set solid, joints tight.
If something we built moves, cracks or fails in the first year because of how it was built, we come back and fix it. No argument, no invoice.
Trace the job on a satellite view of your own property, or send a photograph, and the page prices it. The on-site visit is free and it is what makes it exact.