Retaining walls in Portland, Maine.
Portland is a hilly city, and plenty of its backyards are held up by stone or timber walls built generations ago. When one of those walls leans, or a grade change needs to be held for a new patio or driveway, the wall becomes the job.
The city's Land Use Code is more relaxed about walls than about buildings on one point: required setbacks do not apply to fences, retaining walls, raised garden beds and similar structures. A wall can run along a property line where a house could not. Other parts of the code are stricter, and they depend on where the lot sits.
Street-facing walls in historic districts
Retaining walls are named in the code's definition of site alterations, which require review for properties inside a historic designation. The design standards also refer to masonry walls and fences as features that form a continuous edge along the street. Rebuilding a granite or brick front wall in one of these areas is reviewed administratively, and in-kind repair with matching material is treated as ordinary maintenance. A wall out of sight of any street or park, as seen by someone walking past, falls outside that review entirely, which frees most backyard terracing from it.
Shoreland walls, bluffs and the islands
Within the Shoreland Overlay Zone, grading and excavation that needs a permit also needs a written erosion and sedimentation control plan, and the code lists retaining walls and riprap among the permanent stabilization measures such a plan can use. Setbacks there are measured from the top of any coastal bluff the Maine Geological Survey has mapped as unstable or highly unstable, which matters on any lot at the top of a coastal bank.
The Maine Geological Survey explains that as the glacier retreated, the sea flooded low-lying southern Maine and fine silt and clay settled on its floor as the Presumpscot Formation. Where a wall retains that kind of soil, water trapped behind the stone freezes and pushes. Our walls are built with a crushed-stone drainage zone, drain pipe and filter fabric behind the face, whether the face is granite veneer, natural boulder or segmental block, so water drains out rather than building up against the back of the wall.
A boulder wall suits a sloped yard on Peaks Island or in outer Deering. A block or veneer wall is often the better fit beside a narrow city driveway, where every inch of width counts.
Granite · Boulder · Block
How we handle retaining walls
Whether it is a granite veneer entry wall with lantern pillars, a terraced boulder slope or a structural block wall behind a new build, we engineer for drainage and frost so the wall you pay for once stands for decades.
See the full retaining walls service page or everything we do in Portland, Maine.
Retaining Walls in nearby towns
- Retaining Walls in South Portland
- Retaining Walls in Falmouth
- Retaining Walls in Westbrook
- Retaining Walls in Scarborough
- Retaining Walls in Cape Elizabeth
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- Hydroseeding, Sod & Turf in Portland
- Lawn Aeration & Overseeding in Portland
- Fall Cleanup & Leaf Removal in Portland
- Commercial Mowing & Cleanups in Portland
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- Tree & Shrub Services in Portland
- Tree Removal in Portland
Sources for the local facts on this page
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