#HTE

An Easy Way to Build Retaining Walls: Leave the Concrete in the Bag, Stack Like Legos, Wet With a Hose

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Building a retaining wall in the conventional ways (above) is not a trivial matter. So DIYers have come up with an interesting trick: Rather than messing around with mortar, they lay the walls down like Lego pieces, using concrete while it’s still in the bag.

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That’s right, the idea is that you don’t open the packaging. Once the bags are laid, you wet everything down thoroughly with a hose, saturating all of the bags.

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Once the concrete sets up, you can either wait for the paper to biodegrade, peel it off, or burn it off.

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Prior to wetting the concrete, you can easily drive rebar into the bags as reinforcement.

You can also use the technique to build sunken fire pits.

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Once cured, you can tell that these were made using bags, but I don’t find the effect unpleasing.

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If you want to use “bricks” that are smaller in size than your standard concrete bags, you can put in some extra work and re-bag the concrete in smaller lunch bags. That’s what the fellow below did to create a retaining wall, and even a short series of steps, to brick in this culvert:

I wonder if, as in the entry about fenceposts, you can simply wait for a thunderstorm and forgo the hose step.

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https://www.core77.com/posts/80454/An-Easy-Way-to-Build-Retaining-Walls-Leave-the-Concrete-in-the-Bag-Stack-Like-Legos-Wet-With-a-Hose