Last week I wrote about my recent trip to Southern California. I was fortunate to spend time with a dear friend and his wife. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person who’s more in love with a home ...

Humans have been building retaining walls for thousands of years to create flat, or gently sloping, terraces on hillsides. A lot of my readers have them on their own property – or need to build one – ...

This is the penultimate video in this series as we are so very near the end. All we've got to do is log more work! I'll show ...

Does your backyard have a slope? If it does, you face an increased erosion risk, as rainwater slowly, subtly, but surely washes away the soil from the slope. This process floods surrounding areas with ...

The robotics experts at ETH Zurich have developed an autonomous excavator that uses advanced AI to help it complete high-skill tasks without a human operator. Dry stone wall construction typically ...

Homes are not always located on flat lots. In fact, landscapes can feature hills and valleys, necessitating some extra steps when installing certain features. Retaining walls are often utilized to ...

My daughters grew up playing a video game called Tetris, and we recently used the skills they learned from that game to build a wall. The Wikipedia definition of the game is this: “In Tetris, players ...

Building on the hills of Napa presents a special set of challenges for a contractor, but what with the scarcity of building sites in Napa County, ingenuity can turn what might have been an ...

AWARE received funding to construct a retaining wall to mitigate future landslide damages, but high construction prices will likely push its cost to more than the awarded grant funding. “The design we ...

It’s tragic to spend the time and money to build a retaining wall only to have it fail. Unstable walls can be dangerous; at the very least they are a discouraging waste of resources. Over the years we ...

Sonora High School students in teacher Jason Rivera’s construction class are building a retaining wall behind their classroom, and the project is being touted as an example of how Career Technical ...