Masonry and Retaining Walls in Brentwood, Tennessee

The Grade Decides What the Work Really Is

Large wooded lots on rolling ground are why people live in Brentwood, and also why so many houses up there need masonry that has nothing to do with the house itself. A driveway cut into a slope needs a wall on the uphill side. Walkout basements leave one elevation buried and another fully exposed. Flat yard on a sloped site exists only because somebody terraced it.

Every one of those is really a water project wearing a masonry hat. Rain that lands on the ridge above your house has to get past your property. It travels either where a design sent it or where gravity takes it, and the wall or the foundation pays the difference. So when we get called about a leaning wall, the first hour goes uphill of the problem rather than at it.

• Segmental block or boulder walls leaning, bulging or tipping at the ends
• Cap blocks loose or separated along the top course
• Soil and mulch washing through the face of a wall after heavy rain
• Wet spots and seeps that appear on a slope days after a storm
• Cracked stoops, steps and stone columns on the downhill side of a house

Why Retaining Walls Fail Here

A retaining wall is holding back soil, and around Brentwood that soil is clay. Clay swells when it is wet and it pushes hard. A wall built to hold dry dirt will not hold wet clay, so almost every failure we look at traces back to one of three things.

The first is drainage. With no clean stone behind the wall and no pipe at the base carrying water out, the backfill saturates and the wall becomes a dam. The second is reinforcement. Above a modest height a block wall needs geogrid tied back into the soil behind it, and plenty here were stacked without any. The third is the base. A wall built on topsoil settles unevenly and opens joints from the bottom up.

You can usually read which one it was from the shape of the failure. A wall bowing through the middle is a reinforcement problem. A wall tipping forward at the top is pressure and water. A wall stepped apart at one end is normally the base. We would rather diagnose that than rebuild the same mistake in better looking block.

One more thing worth saying plainly. Walls above a certain height generally require an engineered design and a permit. We will not tell you what the threshold is, because that is the City of Brentwood's call. Ask them before you plan a project, not after.

Shallow Rock, Springs and Middle Tennessee Clay

Williamson County sits on limestone, and on a hillside that rock can be far closer to the surface than anyone expects. That cuts both ways. Rock is an excellent thing to found a wall on. It is also why an excavation meant to take a morning takes two days, and why a footing sometimes cannot go where the drawing put it.

Limestone country also means water moves through the ground in ways you cannot see. Seeps and small springs show up on these slopes, sometimes only in wet seasons, sometimes only after the ground above has been disturbed. A wall built across one without a drainage plan stays wet permanently, and wet masonry in a climate that freezes and thaws all winter has a short life.

When we hit rock or find water during excavation we stop and tell you before we spend your money. Sometimes the answer is a shorter wall in a different position. Sometimes it is a drain line before any block goes down. What we will not do is bury the problem and let you find it in three winters.

The Big Brick Houses Are Reaching an Age

Much of Brentwood's housing is substantial brick built from the seventies into the nineties, and work is coming due on it now. These are large elevations with tall gable end chimneys, cast stone accents and long runs of veneer, often on lots graded and filled to make room for the house.

The pattern is consistent. Chimney crowns cracked years ago and the top courses have gone soft. Stoops and stone steps built over fill have settled while the house has not. Mortar joints on the weather side are eroded well past those on sheltered elevations. Almost none of that is structural, and almost all of it gets worse ignored, because every one is a place water enters and freezes. Caught now it is maintenance rather than restoration.

• Chimney crowns reformed with an overhang and a proper drip edge
• Repointing the weather exposed elevations before the sheltered ones
• Rebuilding settled stoops and steps on footings that reach firm ground
• Resealing and repointing joints around cast stone sills and quoins
• Correcting downspout discharge that dumps against the veneer

Getting a Hillside Job Quoted

We walk the site, including the ground above and below the work, and look at where machinery can actually reach. On a long sloped driveway with mature trees, access decides both the schedule and a good part of the cost. If a wall has to be built by hand because nothing can get to it, you should know before you get a number.

You get a written scope stating the drainage design, the reinforcement, the base preparation and the finish, because those decide whether a wall lasts twenty years or five. Pricing moves with height, length, material, excavation and whether rock shows up. Only a site visit produces a real figure. Send photos with the quote form and we can usually tell you whether it is a repair or a rebuild.