Retaining Walls in The Kingsway

The land here rises from the Humber River valley, and houses on the eastern streets sit on slopes that the original builders handled with stone. Front lawns step up to the house, side paths climb, and rear yards on the valley side can drop toward the ravine. Many of those first walls were dry-laid or mortared fieldstone. After eighty or ninety years, the mortar has washed out, frost has nudged stones forward, and some walls now bulge at the middle.

Rebuilding them in matching natural stone keeps the look the neighbourhood is known for. Behind the face, the method is modern: a compacted gravel footing with the first course buried, clear stone backfill and a perforated pipe, so the new wall isn't pushed out the way the old one was. Where an old wall is sound but leaning slightly at one end, sometimes only that section needs to come down and be reset.

Getting stone to the backyard is its own puzzle. Side yards between these houses can be very narrow, so equipment is small and some placing is done by hand, which affects the schedule and is built into the quote. On lots close to the Humber valley, Toronto's Ravine and Natural Feature Protection by-law or TRCA regulation can apply to grading, trees and walls, and we check the mapping before design. For a wall over 1 m of exposed height beside a sidewalk or a building entrance, an Ontario Building Code permit is part of the job.