Retaining Wall Contractors in Auckland

Most retaining walls on an Auckland property exist because somebody wanted a flat area where the ground was not flat - a wider driveway, a usable lawn, a pool, a level courtyard behind the house, or a building platform on a sloping section. The wall is almost never the point. It is what makes the flat thing possible.

That is how we build them. Pavecraft does the excavation, the wall, the drainage behind it and the surface on top, with our own crews and our own machinery, so the wall and the driveway or paving it is holding up are one job rather than three trades disagreeing about levels. We have been doing this across Auckland for over 20 years, on private properties, subdivisions, apartment developments, schools and retirement villages.

The walls we build

• Keystone and segmental block walls - dry stacked interlocking concrete blocks on a compacted base, with geogrid tied back into the fill where the height calls for it. They come in a range of faces and colours, they curve easily, and they are the usual choice for garden terracing, driveway edges and anywhere the wall is going to be looked at every day.
• Reinforced concrete block walls - blockwork on a reinforced footing, filled and tied to an engineered design. The answer where a wall is tall, carries a surcharge such as a driveway or a structure above it, or has to sit hard against a boundary.
• Timber pole and rail walls - treated poles with timber rails or sleepers. Still the most economical wall for a modest height on an accessible site, and the right choice for a lot of residential terracing.
• In situ concrete walls and seat walls - poured walls, planter walls and the curved concrete seat walls that turn up in town centre and commercial landscaping. See streetscapes and town centres.

The drainage behind the wall is most of the job

Retaining walls very rarely fail because the blocks were not strong enough. They fail because water built up behind them. Saturated ground is far heavier than drained ground and it pushes with a pressure the wall was never designed to take, so the wall leans, then cracks, then moves.

What prevents it is unglamorous, and all of it happens before the wall is even visible: drainage coil at the base running to a proper outfall, free draining backfill rather than the clay that came out of the hole, geotextile so the surrounding soil cannot clog the drainage, and compaction in layers behind the wall as it rises. It costs very little at the time. It is the single biggest difference between a wall that lasts and a wall that gets rebuilt, and it is the first thing to disappear from a cheap price.

Engineering and consent

Whether a wall needs a specific engineered design and a building consent depends on how high it is, what it is retaining, and what sits above or below it. A wall holding up a driveway or a neighbouring structure is a different proposition from a low garden terrace. That question belongs with Auckland Council or a chartered professional engineer rather than with us, and it is much better asked early than late.

What we can do is tell you from looking at the site whether a wall is likely to need a design, build to an engineer's drawings and details, and arrange our work around the inspections. We hold Sitewise Gold and Site Safe accreditation, and we are used to working under a main contractor's health and safety system on a live site.

Walls as part of the landscape

A retaining wall usually arrives with paving, steps, drainage and levels attached, which is why it sits inside our hard landscaping work rather than beside it. We can build from a landscape architect's drawings or set the job out on site with you, and we finish the top as part of the same contract, whether that is paving, concrete, exposed aggregate, steps or a permeable surface.

Where we work

We are based at Triton Drive in Rosedale and work from Whangarei to Karaka. A good deal of our retaining work is on the North Shore and in West Auckland, where the clay and the slope make walls a common requirement, as well as Silverdale, Orewa and north to Warkworth, and across the central and eastern suburbs. For the excavation that goes with it, see driveway excavation and siteworks.