Most retaining walls go wrong before a single block is laid. A wall sat on a shallow pad instead of a footing sized to the soil. No drainage behind it, so the first wet winter starts pushing. A price quoted over the phone by someone who never looked at the slope, the fall or the load above it. By the time you can see the problem, the wall leaning out a couple of winters in, the bulge in the middle, the crack stepping along the courses, the builder is long gone and the warranty was never in writing.

Tierline started in 2009 after twenty-five years on the slopes of the Hills watching exactly that. The founding idea was simple: write the quote so the price, the material, the footing and the drainage are impossible to hide, and put an honest by-the-face-metre range on the screen so a homeowner knows roughly what a 14 m sloped-block wall costs before booking anyone. The face-metres and height, the material, the footing and reinforcement, the drainage, the engineering line over a metre, the excavation, the boundary note. Each one a line. Put next to a cheaper quote, ours does not look dearer. It looks complete.

I would rather lose the job to an honest by-the-face-metre price than win it by stacking block on a shallow pad with no drainage. The walls I win on a quote that names the footing and the ag-line are the ones still dead straight in twenty years.

Today we build concrete sleeper and core-filled besser, timber sleeper, link-block and segmental, natural stone and gabion, and the engineered walls over a metre where we bring the design and the council approval, plus the repairs and rebuilds of failed walls in between, across the Adelaide Hills, with no travel surcharge within 35km of Stirling.