Retaining wall

Not long after completing the bathroom, I decided to build a retaining wall and side walk for the front yard. I did all the shovelling by hand because of all the pipes in the area. I discovered one pipe about a foot closer to the curb than originally marked, so I had to cut the width of the side walk in half.

I used Pisa 2 blocks from Mutual Materials. I've used these blocks before in the backyard when I built two 20ft long retaining walls about six years ago.

With the backyard walls, I used a Dingo front end loader (that you walk behind and is 3ft wide) and I had all the digging done in less than an hour.

I think it took me more than a month of digging by hand in the evenings to clear an area four feet wide and 30 feet long.

One of the hardest parts was splitting the Pisa 2 corner units. Pisa 2 units come stuck together and you have to split them to reveal the face. The tapered units that make up the bulk of the wall take me two to six hammer/chisel hits (sometimes one hit and sometimes ten hits). I think the corner units took me closer to fifty and the first one probably took a hundred.

I'm not really sure what I'm doing better that it takes fewer hits to split them.