Garden Retaining Wall

Looking to do a garden retaining wall in the front your home? A landscape design that will give your outdoor space a major curb appeal boost.

Our Retaining Wall diy is a showstopper, was built in a just a couple weekends, and cost less than hiring it out to a professional! You, yourself can diy these garden walls too!

Here (below) is the Garden Retaining Wall Part 1: where we begin planning and getting started with a much-needed yard landscaping makeover.

***(Woo-hoo, this project is finished, and you won’t want to miss these landscaping ideas and see what it looks like completed with some beautiful flowers, lava rock, and interlocking topping stone pavers!) I can’t believe the transformation!***   

The 81-degree heat wave has officially begun in my home state of Ohio. I even swapped my McDonald’s hot coffee for a chilled iced coffee. That’s a huge deal if your a coffee lover. With all this nice weather after hibernating all winter my husband & I navigated outdoors only to start our next do-it-yourself home improvement project using stone retaining wall blocks!

So, I wanted to show you what we’ve been up to the last couple days. I just know there is some plants and pretty flower shopping in my near future (I think this is going to require a few more of those iced coffees, I think it will get me through).

I want to start you off with a sweet little before photo, as per usual. By sweet, I mean inadequate. Sure, it looked good at one time but the winter really treated her harsh.

Retaining Wall For Flower Bed: The process of Planning a Front Yard Retaining Wall & Getting Started

We immediately figured out our landscape design plans and headed to Lowes. Since our home is positioned on a slope we knew we wanted a raised flower bed with retaining walls.

What Blocks Did We Use For Our Retaining Flower Bed Walls?

Now, a retaining wall can be constructed with various materials such as wood, bricks, natural rock or even concrete blocks. You may find this article helpful if you’re wanting more info about choosing the right retaining wall for your design needs and considering your environment.

We chose these gray concrete blocks because it complimented so nicely with our stone on the front of the house and they seemed easy enough to work with for the DIYer. It’s also a heavy weight material so with proper stacking and adhesive it would have no problem lasting decades and withstanding the soil behind it.

We chose to keep the original shape of our flower bed (the way the Ryan Homes landscapers first edged the shape) we began digging and edging our own trench for the foundation.

My handyman cracked jokes the entire time while I reminded him of his awesome pack of sun burned muscles (they weren’t exposed during this shot). It’s all about the teamwork. I think he was impressed with how good I got with (get us drinks) breaks. 😉

We took out all the bushes in order to raise the bed up, then we were planning on putting them right back in addition to some colorful ones. Tell me you see the drinks (I must have been on break in this photo, what’s the odds?)

During the process of transplanting, we ran into some unexpected guest. Cute ones.

These precious little bunnies put things on hold, or we would have got done a whole lot sooner. This is a common diy problem, right? Even though we were a little annoyed they took over our flower bed we still could not help to peek on them to see if they got any cuter.

We watched them grow all the way up until they come out of the nest on their own. Their debut was bittersweet, kind of sad. Okay, enough with the crying-back to work.

We are making a lot of progress and stacking and laying stone with our handy liquid nail adhesive! Making sure everything is level for a secure foundational retaining wall.

We chose to take the stone concrete blocks all the way to our walkway and cut the bottom stone that meets up to it precisely to fit against it, taking a small corner off using an Angle Grinder and a Concrete Blade.

This is what it looks like at this point. Next time I’m back on the blog I will share with you the finished look of the garden bed retaining wall. Have you been in your flower bed at all this summer? Have any flower recommendations for me? Anything for people who are good at killing plants?

Updated: We went and bought perennial flowers for our flower bed and they look gorgeous. I managed to not kill any plants in my flower bed and here are my favorites thus far (in case you’re looking for pretty no-kill perennials for your garden bed too).

Since this post, We’ve played in more dirt so be sure to check out our Landscaping around the A/c Unit, The flower bed transformation on the side of the house where we spruced up our curb appeal around the garbage can, and we also did a raised garden bed in the backyard.

>>Want to skip over to our tips and tricks to building this retaining wall diy step-by-step (10 easy steps at that!) In How To Build Retaining Wall Garden<<

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