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 traditional way (above) is not a trivial proposition. So the do-it-yourselfers came up with an interesting trick: instead of playing around with mortar, they put down the walls like Lego pieces and use concrete while it’s still in the bag.

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The idea is that you don’t open the package. Once the bags are in place, thoroughly wet everything with a tube and saturate all of the bags.

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

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Before wetting the concrete, you can easily drive the reinforcement into the bags as reinforcement.

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

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Once cured these can be said to have been made with bags but I don’t find the effect uncomfortable.

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If you want to use “bricks” that are smaller than your standard concrete bags, you can do extra work and repack the concrete in smaller lunch bags. That’s what the guy below did to create a retaining wall and even a short series of steps to brick that culvert:

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I wonder if, like in the entry about fence posts, you can just wait for a thunderstorm and do without the hose step.

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