I am building a concrete retaining wall and several people have told me I should do a ‘footing’ for the retaining wall to stand on. What’s a footing and do I really need one?
Without getting into too much detail, a footing is a concrete pad that provides support for walls. Typically it is at least twice as wide as the base of your wall, at least 8 inches or thicker and runs the length of whatever wall is being built. In this case, your retaining wall would be built directly on top of the footing. Normally rebar is embedded in the footing both the length of it and vertically out of it. The rebar connects the footing to the wall. There are quite a few more considerations to consider with respect to retaining walls than I can cover here. Contact a local contractor or send me an email with as much info as you can and I’ll look it over.