Retaining Wall Installation in Malvern, PA & Surrounding Areas

The Benefits of Retaining wall Installations

Retaining walls installations offer a wide range of benefits, from increased curb appeal to protection for your most valuable investment: your home. Whether creating cultivatable space on severely sloped land or taking steps to prevent damage from stormwater runoff, retaining walls add significant value. Additionally, the American Society of Landscape Architects estimates that investing in landscape improvements like retaining walls can generate up to 15% of additional value for a home.

Better still, retaining walls not only create value, but they actually grow in value over time.

When storms hit sloped properties, water runs downhill. This is called stormwater runoff, and it can create major headaches for homeowners.

Unchecked, stormwater runoff seeps into foundations and creates vulnerabilities in the slab. When water congregates in a concrete foundation, it repeatedly freezes, melts, and refreezes with little opportunity to dry out because it is underground. This creates cracks in the foundation that can force homeowners to make untimely and expensive foundation repairs.

Another one of the benefits of installing a retaining wall is that it protects a home’s foundation by preventing erosion. When rain hits a hill, it slowly flattens it by carrying sediment from the top to the bottom of the hill. This process can take hundreds of years to show, but it can take only a few decades to shift the land enough to cause foundation problems. Once this happens, homeowners can find themselves locked in a losing battle against time and water as their foundations slowly lose structural integrity.

A retaining wall acts as a belt, compressing the earth behind it as tightly as it can. This keeps the ground from shifting too much, and because retaining walls create flat land, they stall the effects of erosion by preventing sediment from moving downhill.

There is another foundational threat retaining walls mitigate: sinkholes. Over time, concentrated, heavy rainfall creates sinkholes. When water soaks deep into the ground, it can degrade the bedrock. If this happens for long enough, sinkholes of any size can emerge, dealing devastating damage to a home, its grounds, and its foundation.

Depending on what part of the country you live in, you may be at a higher risk for sinkholes. Homeowners in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas are especially vulnerable.

This is where retaining walls come in. Retaining walls prevent water from pooling in low areas, which in turn reduces the risk of sinkholes developing in the bedrock and keeps properties safe for decades.