I have looked for contractors for a variety of projects and found them to be generally undependable.
If you call 10, 4 answer the phone. The others don't call back.

Of the four, one or two will actually come to the site. Of those who come to site, you have to call back 4 times to get a quote.

It doesn't matter if it's landscapers, plumbers, electricians; whomever.

As for the budget, it seems that you have underestimated the man-hour cost, based upon previous quotes.

Walls are very expensive because of the material cost and back breaking labor. Your cost can vary greatly depending on what materials you choose.
As for a plan for the wall, why do you need one? I would suggest taking pictures of walls you like and showing them to whatever contractor you choose, there is really no need to have a plan for a wall unless you are looking for something incredibly intricate(in that case you will spend $$$).
I would try www.kudzu.com and search based on customer reviews.

BTW Not all contractors are unreliable.

I sent you an email about a very honest contractor who works in and around SE Atlanta. He's amazing, and he keeps his costs as low as he can go. Very honest too!

girlgroupgirl

GGG: Thanks! Got it.

heavenscent: I've laid block before myself on several occasions. I'm no stranger to cinder, mortar and trowel :( While it is true that laying block *is* backbreaking work, it's not $4,000-$5,000+ backbreaking work when it's just a 30' wide, 3-to-4-block-high wall. I can dig and pour the footer and lay the block with straps for $500 myself and pay someone $750 to veneer it, but honestly...I have a kitchen I'm trying to remodel right now and would rather pay someone else to do it! ;)

(Time is money)

alex: I've unfortunately experienced essentially what you have, and clutch on for dear life with the one contractor I work with on occasion. I don't do paint and try not to do any framing or mudding at the house - everything else, I'm game. I was lucky enough (?!) to grow up poor, else I probably wouldn't have learned how to run electric, plumbing and other general construction stuff as a child from my father and grandfather. I admittedly dislike masonry greatly after a a couple of years of laying block (on and off) down in Florida, and I'll be the first to say I'm not that great with laying a curved wall using block.

If anyone is wondering what I'm doing and why, this is what I'm up against:

I share this large mound with my neighbor - (see link to pic below)

The pic is taken with a wide angle lens and shoddily joined, so it is very hard to tell, but the gradient from where I'm standing in the picture(s) up to the street is 12 or greater (it varies). There is approximately a 4'-5' drop from the top of the mound to the middle of our yards, and the mound itself is actually a mound - cigar shaped with a definite apex a foot or so from the street. The apex of the mound is 12-18" above street level

What I'm looking at doing is simple: Since we have this "bowl" between our two yards/sidewalks which is full of grass, and we have this large, unmanageable mound with everything from greenbriar to wild blackberry constantly coming up, we want to toss in a well-planned curved knee-wall with a height that is 6" above the street level. When it is in place, we plan to level the mound out and backfill to the wall while amending/condition the existing soil.

With damage that the black walnut (pictured tree @ 7-8" DBH, not the large sweet gum) has sustained over the years - if it even comes back this year - it will probably be dropped in favor of a fruit tree, and the majority of the levelled area will be filled with edible landscaping and native plants, with additional planting space at the base of the wall (for ??), and we will possibly do plantings to cascade over the wall.

These are relatively new houses, and the mound, huge sweet gum, small black walnut (buried above the crown, no less) in the picture is all that really remains of the previous car-and-tire-dumping gulley that the contractor left when building our home in '02/'03. Of course, as with most houses in this area, the contractor dug the ground out and backfilled everything with clay, so growing has required a LOT of amendment to the soil, and lots of tricks to get the earthworms to come in and help us out, but we're making great headway :)

Thanks for reading, looking and feedback!

(hopefully I didn't come off snotty, it doesn't read like it to me, but you know how the internet is ...)

$4000-$5000 is a lot of money for that small of a project no doubt, especially if you are looking at cinder block construction with veneer! I was thinking more along the lines of stack stone.

Sorry to get so defensive with the contractor remarks. My husband and I have a construction business of our own, so sometimes those remarks are taken personally. ;)

Oh, I didn't find your remarks offensive. My skin is thicker than a gator! :)

Stack stone would be great - but if we were using slate or similar to stack, we'd have over $2k-3k in materials alone! If we went that route, I think $4k-5k would be relatively reasonable for planning, materials, time and installation.

I think veneering is going to be the cheapest, easiest and most sturdy way that will look good. It's not like it will hold a lot of earth, but the ability to rebar your blocks into the ground for longevity is priceless IMHO.

Thanks again :)

We're also about to build a stone wall in Grant Park. We don't have a contractor yet, but my husband, the intrepid craigslister, found this ad today for granite. I've been told we're getting a load.

Thanks for the link, scotland.

We're in Boulevard Heights, the neighborhood bordering you on the south side (on other side of RR tracks, east side of Boulevard). We've spent the last two weekends getting our community garden tilled out and planted, and we could really use two large truckloads of granite "riprap" to help with erosion issues in the city creek that runs through the commnunity garden area. It looks like that could be a viable solution, but I'm not sure if we even have $400 in the neighborhood budget to do something like that.

Do you (or anyone else) know of a place that would be willing to donate a couple of loads of riprap to a community? Anyone have a contact for such a thing?

Our wall was finished up today, so I thought I should follow up on this in case someone finds it later so this isn't just left "hanging". I also wanted to share pictures because we're so excited about it.

Now, ever since we moved into this house, we have had serious flooding issues out front due to the poor street paving work we were left with (Thanks, City of Atlanta!) Then there was the stupid mound in front of the house which didn't do much of anything worthwhile except collect weeds. Any time we rec'd any significant downpour (more than a half an inch in 1-2 hours), the result was a "lake" in front of the house that left us unable to park. It would fill up until it reached our sidewalk, at which time it would overflow down the sidewalk, right down into our beds, which resulted in the death of several salvia last year due to waterlogging.

When I say "lake", I'm not kidding....this is at least 6"-8" deep:

Well, after posting this thread, we (unexpectedly) got a solid contractor lead from it, and the real green light was a solid reference for this contractor we'd received from another member (thanks, GGG, for everything!) The contractor we chose was GW member 'vroomp', or Brad in real life, and his company DCR, Inc.

I was not kidding about the previous contractors we contacted above over the past couple of years - if we got a call back, most wouldn't show up, and this led to so much delay. It was amazing - out of probably three dozen phone calls to Brad, the only time he didn't actually pick up was on a Sunday at 9pm, and, really, I wouldn't have answered either! He was literally at our house within a day or two to walk through the plans and give us options, hash out ideas, toss out suggestions. It was quite refreshing, a huge change from what we were accustomed to.

What started out as a small 30'-40' wall wound up finding its way up to 62', and then almost 75' .... our fault, of course - the neighbors wanted to join forces and have the wall spread between both yards. I imagine we were the nightmare customers from hell - changing lengths, changing shapes, took us a while to pick out the stone, we couldn't decide on lighting or drains, etc.

Through the process, Brad was really communicative and very sensitive to issues and changes we needed to make along the way, and *incredibly* respectful of our budgeting desires, and held his cool even when our neighbors and I couldn't get our crap straight on budgeting (again - thanks Brad!!) We got everything sorted out. He even tossed in a couple of extras including sealing the back of the wall and adding an additional drain for the neighbors, which was not in the original plan.

The end result is bigger and better than we'd expected, and the wall has already become a fixture to hang out on and chat with the neighbors and relax with friends, rivalled only by our deck.

For pictures of our flooding issues and the mound itself, in all of its (ha ha) glory, check out this gallery page

For a couple more pictures of the mound, and the wall before and after it was veneered out, check out this gallery page

Since the wall was constructed, we have not had a single issue with flooding, in fact, the drain works like a champ and the sea outs we have growing at the base of our rather steep yard's slope (back/rear of the house) couldn't be happier about the additional water.

All in all, the pictures speak for themselves, but I really felt it was necessary to come in and share my experience. I know this was a small job for Brad in comparison to what he's accustomed to, but we're really grateful for his taking it on, and regardless of how small it was, he treated us as if we were spending ten times what we actually did (and again - if you're reading this - THANKS.) We've already sent two of our friends his way, and they've had good experiences as well.

I'll post more pictures of the wall in this thread as it gets planted out. We're waiting on stone to revive/refurb the original granite curb that exists throughout our neighborhood, and some fill dirt and mulch to bring the soil level up just a tad. The ultimate goal is to fill/amend, landscape mat, then plant with edibles...cherry and plum trees, blueberries, cranberries and several natives for the fill-in between.

The end result:

WOW! What a beautiful wall. Vroomp, you did an AWESOME job on that! I LOVE IT.
And I surely understand the lake effect. We had a pond before the tornado. Now we get an ocean complete with waterfall.
Should be corrected later this year. Vroomp consulted with me on some ideas for that. The grader that came out said he was absolutely dead on.

GGG

He clearly knows his stuff - here's another one for you:

I have a couple of friends that live in Brookhaven - apparently up until the mid-90's, builders were allowed to bury construction debris on-site when a job was complete, and simply backfill over it. Well, my friends bought a house with a beautiful (large) woodsy incline in the back yard and a 'brand new' deck that met up with the back wall of the house very near the incline.

Starting around 6 months after they moved in, over the course of the next year, the backyard slowly began to sink (drastically) near the base of the incline - I'm talking 2'-4' holes in some places. Our friends got several estimates on excavation, filling and installing retention walls, some as high as $30k+, some as low as $10k. Of the three quotes I know he rec'd elsewhere, all of them strictly dealt with excavation/back-filling/single retention wall.

I told my friend he should contact Vroomp and have him stop by to check it out because we were happy with the work he was doing and he might have a competitive quote. Our friends called that day and Vroomp was on-site to check it out just a few hours later (!!!). In the process, Vroomp also noticed the deck was built right up to the side of the house .... my friend was shocked as he walked over and stuck a pen right through his outer wall - Vroomp knew the proximity of the deck was holding moisture to his house and rotting his wall away, and this was probably another urgent issue he'd want to fix.

My friend Mike was set back - possibly angry at first because some stranger put a pen through his house ;) - but it really showed him that Vroomp obviously knew his stuff; Out of all of the other people that came through to quote the job, nobody said a word about the deck or anything else in the yard of concern that could be an inexpensive fix now versus a very costly repair later.

They've been constantly out of town and haven't been able to commit to doing anything yet, but I've talked to them at great length and I'm quite certain they're going to use him. I truly think they'll be happy.

Please stop, I'm blushing already.