Backyard projects don't feel like structural engineering — until you're holding back two metres of soil or a hundred thousand litres of water. Retaining walls and pools are two of the most commonly under-engineered structures in residential construction, and the failures are expensive precisely because they involve earth, water, and neighbours.
Retaining walls: gravity never takes a day off
Soil pushes on a wall permanently, and water in the soil can multiply that push. Most Ontario municipalities require engineering for walls above roughly a metre, but the physics doesn't care about the threshold — we regularly assess failed walls well under it. The design questions are always the same: what soil, what surcharge above the wall (a driveway? a pool?), how does water drain out from behind it, and what keeps the wall from sliding or overturning. A wall that leans a little this year leans more every year after.
Pools: a structure that's sometimes empty
A concrete pool is a water-retaining structure that must also survive being empty — when groundwater outside can push shells upward or crack walls inward. Pool structures near property lines, near existing foundations, or on sloped lots also interact with everything around them; excavating for a pool beside a garage footing is an underpinning problem wearing sunglasses. Engineered drawings sort this out before the excavator shows up.
Water and soil are patient. They'll find the shortcut in a design — this season or five seasons from now.
Pergolas, screens, and other landscape structures
Even light landscape structures need real foundations: wind on a privacy screen or a shade structure generates surprising overturning forces, and frost moves anything without proper embedment. We provide foundation design and sealed drawings for the full range — retaining walls, pools, and landscape structures — sized for your site rather than borrowed from a generic detail. Send photos of your yard and your plans, and we'll quote it the same day.