I’ve spent most of my working life doing drainage and retaining work around the Manawatū, but every so often a job pulls me over the hill into Wellington, and those jobs teach me things flat land never will. One of them was a call from an old workmate who’d retired up to Wadestown, on one…

My partner’s family live in St Clair, one of the beach suburbs of Dunedin, and when the sagging retaining wall along their back boundary finally had to go, I got roped into helping them work out what to replace it with. I’m not a tradesperson — I’m a Papamoa first-home buyer who researches everything about…

A couple in Porirua rang me last winter after the bank behind their garage slumped in the rain and left a slip of clay sitting against the block wall. Same first question everyone asks: what’s a retaining wall going to cost us? I do gardens up in Rotorua, not big structural retaining walls, but between…

A mate of mine bought a place up in Newlands a while back — one of those sloping Wellington sections where the back lawn is basically a cliff held up by hope and a few sleepers the previous owner banged in. After the first big winter the whole lot started bulging, and by spring it…

My name’s Steve, and I’ve spent close to twenty years now landlording and doing my own maintenance on flat sections around Petone and the wider Hutt Valley. The first winter I held one of my rentals on the Petone flat, I learned an expensive lesson about this ground. A tenant rang me in July to…

A bloke in Miramar asked me last spring whether he really needed a geotech report before he could build a retaining wall and level off a bit of his sloping backyard, or whether it was just the council making work for engineers. Fair question, and one I get more than you’d think. I climb trees…