Huge ugly retaining wall

[Moneypit101]

Our house has a massive retaining wall - small sample of it in attached pic. It’s over 12 ft in height.

It retains a property/garden above, and on their side the wall is only 3ft tall. They’ve recently installed a fence.

A structural engineer examined it 8 years ago and indicated that it was well built structurally and no movement was evident. It has drainage built in and is double layered/ hollow middle. We subsequently (c.4 years ago) had someone replace/mortar broken bits, mostly for looks and also to protect it. It was painted before we bought the house but we repainted it 4 years ago - paint has peeled a lot.

Any suggestions on next steps for it? There is a lot of crumbling mortar/it has a lot of moisture coming through it. We’d like to make it look better, and make sure we are protecting it.
Husband has suggested rough casting for looks, but I fear it would just end up collapsing in sheets.

Any suggestions please, particularly to improve the look of it?

Our lawyer advised us it’s jointly owned (us and neighbours) though title deeds are very old.

Thanks

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

Rendering will probably get blown off in a year or four and in anycase won't look any better than what you have now in a few years time. Think I'd plant some tall plants in front of it or if you really wanted to render it you could batten it out, fit a cement board to the battens and render over them but with all those buttresses it would be a PITA and might look a bit weird. Or you could fit some battens and then some timber cladding, perhaps timber slats cladding of some sort, think I'd go the planting route, bamboo and the like. Re-pointing might be on the cards though difficult to tell from those pics but if you're gonna re-point then better to do that now than when it's all hidden behind some pretty cladding or similar.

 

[Moneypit101]

Thank you for such a quick response! Good ideas. Reredening is def on the cards. I’m tempted to patch rendering and then just repaint it and accept that I need to do so every 3 years or so. I do like the cladding idea, though agree it’s tricky with buttresses.

Reluctant to add more greenery as we’ve spent ages making the garden easier to manage and removing trees that were close to property.

Thanks again so much for the advice!!

 

[Odds]

Remove the flaking paint and get in touch with a wall artist to paint something you can look at for years to come.

 

[scbk]

This guy is local, does some amazing work

Fresh Paint

Mural Artist | Graffiti Art | Scotland

freshpaint.org

 

[JohnD]

Bare brick looks better than paint.

 

[RandomGrinch]

Bare brick looks better than paint.

I would usually agree, but looking at the neighbours wall...

It looks like a lot of work would be necessary to get it looking decent, and even then, the result may be oppressive?

 

[JohnD]

If you're going to point it, you could jetwash it first.

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

That might take back to the bricks back to original too which might be quite nice afterall.

 

[Odds]

This guy is local, does some amazing work

Fresh Paint

Mural Artist | Graffiti Art | Scotland

freshpaint.org

Why wouldn't you put something like this on the wall?

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

Because:
a) It would cost thousands.
b) It will require a whole load of wall prep to get it to a standard where the artist is prepared to paint over it.
b) It will flake off just as quick as the old paint.

 

[Moneypit101]

Bare brick looks better than paint.

Agreed, but it was already painted when we bought the hous

Why wouldn't you put something like this on the wall?

this is amazing! Thanks for sharing. I love it. But agree with above poster re the cost/short life unfortunately

 

[Odds]

Because:
a) It would cost thousands.
b) It will require a whole load of wall prep to get it to a standard where the artist is prepared to paint over it.
b) It will flake off just as quick as the old paint.

They can last longer than you say - a pub i used to visit regularly "back in the day" had a fantastic mural painted on an east facing gable end in 1982 and it's still there...but the cost needn't be prohibitive.

 

[Koolpc]

Our house has a massive retaining wall - small sample of it in attached pic. It’s over 12 ft in height.

It retains a property/garden above, and on their side the wall is only 3ft tall. They’ve recently installed a fence.

A structural engineer examined it 8 years ago and indicated that it was well built structurally and no movement was evident. It has drainage built in and is double layered/ hollow middle. We subsequently (c.4 years ago) had someone replace/mortar broken bits, mostly for looks and also to protect it. It was painted before we bought the house but we repainted it 4 years ago - paint has peeled a lot.

Any suggestions on next steps for it? There is a lot of crumbling mortar/it has a lot of moisture coming through it. We’d like to make it look better, and make sure we are protecting it.
Husband has suggested rough casting for looks, but I fear it would just end up collapsing in sheets.

Any suggestions please, particularly to improve the look of it?

Our lawyer advised us it’s jointly owned (us and neighbours) though title deeds are very old.

Thanks

I bet it can be seen from space!