Abraham Wallace

Hi all,

I finally have an update about this project. We ended up moving the dirt away from the side of the barn, lifting the ceiling, and then pressing on the wall with some bottle jacks and 4x4 posts. Once things were mostly how we wanted them, we re-pointed the worst parts of the wall before lowering the upper barn back onto it. All that is left to do is to place two small retaining walls to prevent our dirt from pressing up against the barn.

This took the better part of a week, but was a lot of fun. Thanks for all the advice!

Hi all,

I recently purchased a property in Northern Kentucky that has an old (circa 1870's) barn on the property. The western wall of the barn is acting as a retaining wall. It is roughly 8ft tall and 30ft long. On the non-barn side of the wall is about 6ft of earth, mostly clay. In multiple places, the wall seems to be collapsing, and there are gaps through which you can start to see daylight. This wall also acts as the foundational support for the portion of the wooden barn that sits on top of it. I've included a host of pictures that will hopefully explain my predicament better than I can with words!

So I am sure that I will need to either repair this wall, or build a second form immediately next to this wall for when it inevitably fails. Any thoughts on how I might proceed? I assume that my first step would be to remove as much of the earth pressing on the wall as possible, and install some sort of drainage system to divert as much water away as I can. From there, can I push the wall back to plum, and reinforce it somehow?

Thanks in advance!