Ideas For Outdoor Landscaping And Retaining Wall Blocks

By Darren Hartley


The slack in a weakened housing market is covered by the demand for outdoor landscaping ideas that remains to be strong. The evolution of the backyard living concept started from a deck or patio area and ended with a true outdoor living space complete with a full kitchen.

It is no surprise that popular outdoor landscaping ideas involving structures such as gazebos, arbors, trellises and pergolas are more in demand with the rise in popularity of outdoor living spaces. Deck and patio areas come with a pool for the more fortunate while eating, sitting and living areas come with surround sound and HDTV for the very fortunate.

Simple outdoor landscaping ideas are a thing of the past. People are now thinking more in terms of defining spaces with walls, ceilings and roofs in an open sense to blend with the outdoors. Pergolas have taken off over the last few years from practically 0% business to being the single largest segment of the contracting business.

Always use cap-block finishing parts when building retaining wall blocks. Keeping the water out of the basement is a matter of sealing the wall next to the house. In layers is how backfilling should always be done for structural reasons. By doing backfilling in compacted 8, 10 and 12 inch increments against the wall, ending up with a sunken feature can be prevented.

The installation of gravel behind the wall with a pipe and filter fabric becomes necessary when building retaining wall blocks that are meant to hold back soil that slopes down to it. This installation enables the direction of the water to where it is wanted to go.

Instead of keeping them straight, a curve on the retaining wall blocks may be done. Along the area where the retaining wall blocks are wanted, a garden hose may be placed. Four inches are then dug up in front, following the curve of the hose.




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