concrete foundation for brick wall in garden

We are planning to build a brick wall in our back yard, to replace the old chain link fence along the property line. Our neighbor is on board. Any recommendations for a concrete company to pour the foundation? I don’t know whether the same people work with cement mixer trucks and with portable cement mixers (if such things fit in a basement door).

you can have that pumped in and through the house. if you are building a brick wall and were to call a mason to ask about that they will tell you if they can do the footing or not. we have these kinds of outfits around here in Middle Village, they are actually true construction companies (not handymen or small contractors like myself) that specialize in brick walls and such and they know exactly what to do; you want a specialist, not a generalist and a real pro will do the footing without thinking about it.

i imagine this wall will be 20 or so feet long. i dug footings in my youth but the contractor we worked for NEVER brought in a portable mixer or had people do this manually and some of the footings were in and about the size perhaps of your intended wall. a 20′ footing is a lot of work and a lot of bags of concrete for a mixer and two or three men or even four men. yes, they make small mixers that you can get through your door (we considered doing the concrete in our lane a few years back, so some of this is fresh in my head). another issue with one of t hose cheap mixers that will fit through a door – and i am a contractor so i worry about stuff like this – is that they are garbage and could break down (the cheap modern ones) in the middle of the job. once you begin a pour, you cannot stop.

if you are considering building the brick wall yourself, if you are even contemplating that, then you can dig the footing yourself. that is the hardest part of making a footing (grunt work). dig that below the frost line and set some rebar in there, up off the ground at the bottom (this is on you tube, i am sure and in all sorts of construction books; if i were to do this myself, i would consider it but would review what is required) and call a concrete pumping company and tell them what you are doing and they will tell you what concrete you need (what psi strength; they tell us). i have a buddy who used to work in this field, and he dug things in the morning and just before lunch he’d call a company to pour and in two hours, they arrive. it may take more preparation than that with a pumping company ( i have never been involved in a project that used a pumping company).

if you call a specialist, they will pull all this together and tell you the options for getting the concrete in the house.

I responded to thank you for the detailed and thoughtful reply, but it seems my response got lost. I am sorry.

you do not need to thank me nor apologize. what would really help the community is if you do any of what i say above with or without a contractor, if you come back on here and add to it. that would be thanks enough. as i said i have never been involved in concrete pumping and i would be happy to hear others experiences and yours if you do it.

thanks for suggesting it.

So here is the report on getting a concrete foundation for a garden wall poured. In the end it worked, but it was a harrowing experience. First, cars were illegally parked by the hydrant in front of the house, making getting the truck in position difficult. Worse, when the forms were filled, concrete kept shooting out of the tube onto our garden path and future flower bed! We had hired Transit Mix, although it was more expensive than some others, thinking that having one company deal with both concrete delivery and concrete mixing would be less stressful, but it didn’t work out that way – there were still two companies involved, Transit Mix to provide the concrete and D&S Concrete to do the pumping and neither took responsibility, so we spent hours removing wet concrete from the path and flower bed. (At one point I stepped backwards and my foot sank into a morass of very wet concrete, which we hosed off.) Then we discovered that D&S Concrete had left a parting gift: at the front of the house, two large heavy-duty garbage bags we had left almost empty were now fil led with wet concrete – way too heavy to budge, so we had to remove it, trowel by trowel. They had not properly planned for what to do with concrete still in the pipes once enough is delivered. The fact that their employees’ English was shaky didn’t help.

This explains a lot. A funny thing as well. The day we moved to this house I had a mover coming and it was the same day a neighbor decided to have a patio pumped in his back yard and they took the spot by the hydrant where I wanted to put the moving van.

So this is what I had been thinking. I would have left the footing sub surface and begun the brick there. I know, they say do not use red brick below ground, but it is done all the time. Just a few inches, maybe. That way no forms would be needed.

They can make forms that do not leak but some of these people are not used to working in manicured yards. They are usually pouring footings on major construction sites and a little concrete on the ground does not matter.

I am sorry. Sometime people say I say too much here and here is a case when I did not say enough. We always have to have a wheelbarrow or buckets around for the leftover concrete. They can not take it. I meant to come back on and tell you that and forgot. And I wondered if the pour company would realize you were a newbie by your questi ons and tell you to have something for the remaining concrete.

That experience you just conveyed, I think that is the first time I read something like it here.

Having our wheelbarrow handy would have been good. We should have thought of that!

Hey Ithaca, would be curious of rough price breakdown for the full project, what kind of bricks you are using, style, and so forth. Maybe some photos when it’s all done? Love the idea of brick garden walls.

Same. Please share!