Bill, Just a gut feeling here, but if you are talking about essentially burying one foot of the wall of your house, and it was not designed to be subterranian, you might be asking for some trouble.
Possibly if you build the brick wall close to the house, but not up against it, so that there can be some air flow there, you will avoid many issues. Two feet is not terribly high, so you can easily get away with landscaping blocks and avoid having to use mortar. Drainage is always an issue and you will want to look at this carefully. you should have gravel on the inside of all the walls of the planter, and maybe some drainage tube to carry the water away from the house. Around where I live, there are many houses that have retaining walls right at the edge of the sidewalk so I think it is visually acceptable in many places. If you are building a wall that is essentially 11 X 5 X 2 you are going to be quite surprised at just how many landscaping blocks that is, and how heavy those suckers become after the first hundred. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: d...@andrew.cmu.edu Tel: (412) 268-9081
