Progress on Driveway Retaining Wall

Making some progress on the driveway retaining wall.  Excavation is done for the first section and you can see the wall fountain panel and the layout of a little wall niche that I am including.

I am using a leftover piece of sonotube as a form for the arch.  The fountain still needs castings made for the basins (one upper and one at the base).  I also plan on building a nicer spigot for it.  Right now it just has a piece of junk copper tubing as a mockup.

Here's the completed niche and a few more stones added to the wall!

Driveway retaining wall ideas and plans

I'm turning my attention to my driveway retaining wall this summer since the wooden landscape timbers are well past their prime and rotting away.  I am planning to do this retaining wall out of stone to match the others in the yard.

I want to incorporate some functional features as well as some to add visual interest to the retaining wall itself.  Some of the features that I would like are a garbage bin storage area, a bench, and a small storage shed.  I also plan to add some additional parking space for a motorcycle and an integrated wall fountain feature.

So with this in mind, I made up a rough layout idea sketch in Sketchup.

I then ripped out a section of the rotted landscape timbers and did some test digging to see how far back I could go into the hill before I ran up against the sprinkler system pipes.

I then found a good area to put the fountain feature in the retaining wall.  This sparked a few ideas for re-using a concrete panel I had cast as part of a mailbox pillar a few years back.  I brought the panel out and drilled it with the hammer drill to accept the fountain spout.  I will set it in as a part of the first portion of the stone wall.

Here you can see a bolt sticking through the panel where the future spout will go.  I will likely put some kind of decorative medallion on with the spout sticking through.  It will also need a catch basin at some point too.

In the meantime, I have plenty of excavation and rock work to get started on!  More updates on this project to come.

Finished stone retaining wall bench

I never posted pics of the completed stone bench in the retaining wall, so here they are:

Earth Berm Shed Doors

An earth berm storage shed I incorporated into my retaining wall a couple of years ago was still lacking some doors so I decided to take care of that.

Here is a pic of the shed before the doors went on:

And here is what I decided to do for the doors.  I used OSB with a cladding of small aluminum 'fish scale' shingles.

And here are the doors mounted to the shed.

Another stone retaining wall

This summer I ripped out another rotting rail road tie retaining wall and replaced it with stone.  After my success with the fireplace, I decided to do mortared stone rather than the dry stack technique that I used for the previous walls.

This wall also incorporated a set of stairs and an alcove to store the clothespins for the laundry drying rack.

The stairs going in:

Here's a closer photo of the arched alcove:

Miles and miles of retaining walls

I have a lot of retaining walls in my yard (I live on the side of a hill).  So for the last several years I have been installing stone in place of the rotting railroad tie walls that were original to the yard.  Here are a few pictures of the first walls I have done.

I added a curved bench along the first stretch...

I also cast a few concrete finials from a mold I made out of a vinyl fence post cap.

I still have several hundred feet of retaining wall to go :(
It would go faster if I didn't keep coming up with features that I want to add to  the wall.  I am currently working on an earth-bermed shed that is dug back into the hill on another section of the wall.
I will post some pics of that in the spring.