Once the wall was complete and in good shape, the next piece of the puzzle was put in place. In this case, it was a very large, very heavy piece consisting of about 6 dumptrucks full of gravel, clean fill, and finally, topsoil. Here's a shot immediately after the wall completion - the yard was full of construction debris and basically a mess.
As was mentioned on the previos page, we started with gravel. We used a basic 1/2" mix of gravel that was low dust. We didn't want the drainage pipes to get clogged up with the first rain. The pink marking line in the first shot below shows how far up the slope and how deep we layered the gravel. The second photo shows the quickest way to move lots of material to the back of the house - Bobcat! Unfortunately, the Bobcat broked down after a couple of hours, but that's a different story.
The front of our house was turned into quite a mess while we were doing this project. Luckily we have great neighbors who were very patient and understanding during the whole thing. The first photo shows all of the material used to fill in the back yard. On the far right is the gravel, on the left is the clean fill for the bulk of the work, and the dark brown is the topsoil we used for the top 12-16 inches.
leveling and compacting base layer
while we're at itsprinkler system install
cover it upsod placement
finishing toucheslighting install
ugly fencesfence replacement
if i could turn back timemistakes made/lessons learned