Ahhh, Yes: The Chain Wall!

Let me tell you about the adventure of putting up the chain wall. Well, for those who don't live in Southern Louisiana, we're mostly below sea level down here. And even though the house is going to be in an area that's relatively high compared to the surrounding area, the Parish is still going to require the floor of the house to be elevated relative to the street.

To help with that, people build up their lots with sand or dirt. In order to contain the dirt, you need a chain wall (sometimes called a retaining wall). In my case, the chain wall has my fence posts encased within. Since my neighbor to one side already had his chain wall in place, I only needed to do the rear and the other side.

It's not big construction, but it requires a building permit where I live. And as luck would have it, I went in for the permit a day or so after new codes went into affect. The new codes were overly strict in order to protect the parish from lawsuits after Katrina. In order to get around the ridiculous codes and still build a solid wall, I had to get an engineer to stamp an alternate design so I could get the permit. The design is shown here.

The first step was to dig post holes and install all the fence posts. I thought this part of the job would never end! We rented a post-hole digger for this, and it was soooo worth the money! There were still several holes where the digger couldn't get through some roots. And my design required post holes that were oblong. So we still had holes and portions of holes to dig manually. Especially one huge area of roots where the big tree had been along the property line. The posts were completed in October, 2006.

Then it was time to put forms up for the rear segment of the wall. Here's where we made one msitake that cost us lots of time: The height of the wood we were using wasn't tall enough to reach between the ground and where we knew the top of the wall would need to be. So we made a fateful decision. We decided to build up the ground under the wood instead of cutting another strip of wood to make up the difference at the bottom.

The design of the wall also called for a 6-inch trench where the wall would be. So we found ourselves trying to build a levee of dirt next to a ditch. It was very difficult to pile up dirt without having it fall into the trench. We spent way too many hours shoveling, compacting dirt into a levee, and cleaning out the trench. But finally, the deed was done! The parish inspected the forms, and by late November I had a conrete wall across the back of the property.

One lesson learned here was that we didn't have enough wooden cross-braces going across the top from one side to the other. These were supposed to keep the width of the wall constant and not let the forms bulge out under the weight of the concrete. One of our cross-braces was too thin and came apart under pressure. So there's a 10 ft egg-shaped bulge in the middle of the rear segment. I can live with it, but I'm not happy about it! On the side wall, we made double sure that this didn't happen again.

The neighbors behind me were very generous and let us plug our extension cord in at their house. This allowed us to use power tools throughout the chain wall job. I'm very grateful to them, because I wasn't ready to sign up for temporary electric just yet.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of hiring someone to dig up the remaining tree stumps, grub the grass off the lot, and deliver and spread sand. I got a few quotes. Most said it would be VERY difficult to get those huge stumps out and that afterward there would be huge craters to fill. And they wanted to charge thousands of dollars to try. So, being the frugal son of my mother, we rented a back-hoe to try and remove the stumps ourselves. This was a $400 mistake. Those stumps weren't going anywhere!

Around this time, I started pricing sand for filling in the lot. I found the best price in town, which was a considerable bargain compared to other suppliers. Then I found out that the price was going up after the first of the year. So I had all the sand delivered in December. This was before we had formed or poured the side segment of the wall.

And that's when the rain came...

I had taken my remaining vacation at the end of the year, and I felt we could complete the rest of the wall and spread the sand within those two weeks. But it began to rain... and rain.... and rain. It had never rained like this since I had bought the lot, so I don't know what it would have looked like before. And especially since I now had all this sand there. But the rain flooded the neighbor's back yard and the fence line. And it had nowhere to drain since the rear yards were lower than the front yards. So for at least the next two months (thanks to subsequent downpours), there was a lake where we were supposed to be putting up the forms for the side wall.

But eventually, the water dried up. (Thank you, Lord!) And in the meantime, my dad and I had built the remaining forms we needed out of plywood. And the rest of the forms went up fairly quickly. By mid-March, 2007, the rest of the wall was poured! Within a couple of weeks, I found a good deal for a guy to come spread the sand with a dozer ($275). And now the lot is ready for construction, I assume.