Retaining Walls & Hardscaping in Overland Park

A retaining wall is a structural element holding back several tons of saturated Kansas clay, and it fails from the inside long before it looks wrong from the outside. The walls you see bulging and tipping around Johnson County were almost all built the same way: blocks set on dirt, backfilled with the same clay they are holding, and no drainage.

We build them the other way. Every wall starts with an excavated and compacted base trench and a leveling pad of compacted aggregate, with the first course buried below grade. Blocks are set level and checked course by course, backfilled with clean drainage stone, and given a perforated drain tile with a daylighted outlet so hydrostatic pressure never builds behind the wall. Taller walls get geogrid reinforcement tied back into the retained soil.

We work in segmental concrete block, natural limestone outcropping, and boulder walls, and we will match an existing wall or the stone on your house where it matters. Typical projects include terracing a sloped backyard into usable flat space, holding a grade change at a driveway or walkout, building raised planting beds, and cutting stone steps into a bank so a slope is actually walkable.

Alongside walls we install paver and flagstone patios, walkways, fire pit surrounds, steel and stone bed edging, and boulder accents — the same base preparation and drainage discipline applies to all of it.

Walls over roughly four feet, or any wall carrying a surcharge like a driveway or structure, may require an engineered design and a permit. We flag that up front rather than building past it.