Retaining walls and slope work for Finger Lakes hillside lots

Around Canandaigua Lake, retaining walls aren't decorative — they're what makes a hillside lot usable. A wall holds back the slope so there's room for a driveway, a parking pad, a patio, or a flat piece of lawn between the house and the water. Built right, a wall lasts decades. Built without drainage or a proper base, it leans within five winters.

We excavate and build segmental block walls, natural boulder walls using local fieldstone and quarried stone, and timber walls where they fit. The unglamorous parts are the ones we care about: a compacted crusher-run base below frost influence, drainage stone and perforated pipe behind the wall, geogrid reinforcement on taller walls, and backfill that's placed in lifts rather than dumped.

Walls over four feet generally need an engineer's design and a building permit in most Ontario County towns. We'll tell you when that applies and work from the engineer's plan.

Walls on the lake: frost, water, and the watershed

Freeze-thaw is the enemy of walls here. Water that gets trapped behind a wall freezes, expands, and pushes. That's why the drainage stone and pipe behind the wall matter more than the block on the front. It's also why we set the base on compacted stone rather than on the clay — clay heaves, stone doesn't.

Steep-slope and shoreline rules are part of every lakefront wall job. The Town of Canandaigua, Gorham, Middlesex, and South Bristol regulate work on protected slopes, and anything near the water may involve the DEC. We plan erosion control and permitting into the schedule rather than discovering it halfway through.

The best-looking walls in the area are boulder walls built from the same fieldstone that's been coming out of local farm fields for two centuries. They also drain naturally through the gaps. If your site has stone on it already, we can often use it.