What is the overall size of the terrace? Looks to be about 40' long by maybe 18' deep? How tall? What was there before you did that?
I've got a couple eyesore slopes (one is along the road in front of the house) that I'd really like to do something with and I was thinking of using "wall stones" but the wood terrace sure looks nice.
What did you do to prepare the foundation under wood for stability?
Great eye Robert .. 40 x 17 ...
What was there prior? a slope with brambles and wild blackberry, weeds, built on the remnants of an old narrow gauge railroad bed overfilled with clay ... a whopper of a long story there ...
How tall? Each bed is approx. 16" high (4 4x4's thick)
I dismantled some of the fencing so I could get at the site with the toothbar of my bucket which I then used to strip away vegetation. Then about 12 buckets of uncomposted horse manure with about 8 buckets of composted manure (black gold this stuff is) ... that same ratio give or take for each of the three beds. It was a beyotch getting some of that stuff in there because of the location ond some of it had to be dumped into the next higher bed, the bed made and the material raked down into it.
The stones will always look nicer but I would guess at triple the cost and quadruple the back pain (or price of labor) ...
Lastly, the drilling .. the drilling .. (broke an Erwin 12" extension after the first 4 holes) each corner and the two center sections each have a piece of 7 foot 1/2" rebar and each run of the terrace lengths have 5 pieces of rebar cut at 4 feet ...
Lastly the bottom tier has 2 inches of 1/1/2" draining rock spread on the bed so water snow can leak out and minimize frost heave. We'll see how that works out next spring.
Hoping this won't float away next spring ... the high water mark for the river is only about 600 feet away ..