Thanks to all who provided advice and suggestions. I'm pleased with the way this embankment turned out. I still have a bit of tweaking to do, but I think I'm done with this part and can now turn to working on the yard.
Jim
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Jim,
I must've missed it but what did you construct the retaining wall out of?
Dave
Jim, That looks great.
Matt
I made the retaining wall from a sheet of mosaic stone intended for a kitchen backsplash. I bought the sheet at Home Depot and it's called, Emperado Splitface. I think it cost about $15.00. Each stone on the sheet is about 1.25 inches by 0.5 inches. Highly polished cut stone blocks are scattered throughout the sheet and the color overall is kind of off-putting, but those issues are easy fixed.
Here's what I did. I pulled a bunch of the stones off the backer; they're held on by some type of rubbery cement. They come off pretty easily, I put all the polished stones in a separate pile for - well - some unknown future project. All the others, to include the broken ones, I kept. BTW, I did not use the whole sheet: I just pulled off what I needed. I still have half a sheet left.
To build the wall, I used a drop of E6000 glue on the ends of each block and a couple of drops on the bottom. I dry stacked the wall row by row but didn't glue the stones until I was happy with the way everything looked. I used the broken stones to even up each course. I eyeballed each course and lined up the back edges of the stones to make sure the wall was vertical. I thought that would be a problem, but it wasn't. Once I was done building the wall, I very lightly sprayed the entire thing with a medium gray paint to blend the colors together. I didn't spray too heavy because I wanted the underlying colors and the texture to come through.
It sounds like it's a lot of work to do this, but it really wasn't. Pulling the stones off the sheet was the most time-consuming, but building the wall itself was pretty much like building something with Legos. The nice thing about using these stones was that I could curve the wall and was not stuck trying to bend and glue (and paint) a plastic sheet. I did not build this wall in one session, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the wall took me about 4 hours to complete. And that's from opening the package to painting the stones.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
Jim
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