Huge ugly retaining wall

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Moneypit101

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Our house has a massive retaining wall - small sample of it in attached pic. It’s over 12 ft in height.

It retains a property/garden above, and on their side the wall is only 3ft tall. They’ve recently installed a fence.

A structural engineer examined it 8 years ago and indicated that it was well built structurally and no movement was evident. It has drainage built in and is double layered/ hollow middle. We subsequently (c.4 years ago) had someone replace/mortar broken bits, mostly for looks and also to protect it. It was painted before we bought the house but we repainted it 4 years ago - paint has peeled a lot.

Any suggestions on next steps for it? There is a lot of crumbling mortar/it has a lot of moisture coming through it. We’d like to make it look better, and make sure we are protecting it.
Husband has suggested rough casting for looks, but I fear it would just end up collapsing in sheets.

Any suggestions please, particularly to improve the look of it?

Our lawyer advised us it’s jointly owned (us and neighbours) though title deeds are very old.

Thanks
 

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Rendering will probably get blown off in a year or four and in anycase won't look any better than what you have now in a few years time. Think I'd plant some tall plants in front of it or if you really wanted to render it you could batten it out, fit a cement board to the battens and render over them but with all those buttresses it would be a PITA and might look a bit weird. Or you could fit some battens and then some timber cladding, perhaps timber slats cladding of some sort, think I'd go the planting route, bamboo and the like. Re-pointing might be on the cards though difficult to tell from those pics but if you're gonna re-point then better to do that now than when it's all hidden behind some pretty cladding or similar.
 
Thank you for such a quick response! Good ideas. Reredening is def on the cards. I’m tempted to patch rendering and then just repaint it and accept that I need to do so every 3 years or so. I do like the cladding idea, though agree it’s tricky with buttresses.

Reluctant to add more greenery as we’ve spent ages making the garden easier to manage and removing trees that were close to property.

Thanks again so much for the advice!!
 
Because:
a) It would cost thousands.
b) It will require a whole load of wall prep to get it to a standard where the artist is prepared to paint over it.
b) It will flake off just as quick as the old paint.
 
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