Spent 4 hours trying to level a footing that took 20 minutes the second time

I was building a small retaining wall in my backyard in Austin and spent an entire afternoon fighting a footing that kept sinking on one side. Turned out I was just compacting the base wrong lol. A buddy came over, showed me to wet the gravel first and tamp it in 2 inch layers, and the whole thing was level in 20 minutes flat. Has anyone else had a simple fix like that make you feel dumb for overcomplicating it?

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julia2865d ago

You said "I was just compacting the base wrong" and that really hits the nail on the head for so many of these projects. The part nobody talks about is how the soil type under the gravel changes everything. In Austin we've got that heavy clay that acts like concrete when dry but turns into slip and slide mud when wet. If you didn't wet that gravel down first you basically created a water slide for your footing to shift on. That buddy of yours probably saved you from coming back in six months to a wall that's leaning like the Tower of Pisa. You don't realize how much a tiny moisture difference matters until you watch a perfectly level footing sink three inches overnight after a rain.