Why Eastern Melbourne Earthworks exists

The problem with how retaining walls get built

Most of a retaining wall is buried. The footing, the pier, the drainage aggregate, the ag line, the compaction behind it. By the time anyone stands back and looks at the finished job, every part that determines whether it will still be standing in fifteen years is underground and invisible.

That single fact shapes the whole market. When a buyer cannot see the difference between two walls, they compare the only thing they can see, which is the price. So the competition happens on the visible part, and the savings come out of the buried part, because that is where the money is and nobody will know until it moves.

It is not usually dishonesty. It is that a wall built without an engineered design has no depth specified, no drainage detail and no compaction standard, so there is nothing to cut corners against. Two contractors can both build what they were asked to build and produce very different structures.

Where the gap sits

Retaining walls fall between two industries and neither one is really set up for them.

For a garden wall under a metre with nothing above it, landscaping is the right trade and the right price. Above that height, or where the wall is holding up a driveway, a house or a neighbour's ground, the wall becomes a structure and the requirements change: a stamped design, an engineered footing, and drainage that has to be built and evidenced.

Civil contractors are set up for that kind of structure, but their pricing, plant and overheads are built around projects considerably larger than a residential boundary wall.

In between sits the work: substantial residential walls, builder packages and smaller development jobs that are too structural for a landscaping scope and too small for a civil contract. That is the gap Eastern Melbourne Earthworks was built to fill.

What registration changes

In Victoria a retaining wall over a metre generally requires a building permit, and permitted domestic building work has to be carried out by a registered building practitioner. Many retaining wall contractors are not registered, and for walls under the permit threshold they do not need to be. That is not a criticism, it is simply where their scope ends.

What it means in practice is that a client with a wall over a metre has to assemble the job themselves: an engineer for the design, a registered builder for the permit and the contract, and a contractor to do the work. Three parties, three points of contact, and every gap between them is the client's problem.

Eastern Melbourne Earthworks is registered, CDB U 58737. The permit pathway, the domestic building contract, the insurance and the construction all sit with the same business. That is the difference the registration actually makes, and it is why it appears on the front of the site rather than in the footer.

Why the excavation stays in house

A retaining wall is only as good as the hole it sits in. If the footing is not to depth, or the ground is different from what the drawing assumed, or the spoil cannot get off site, the structure is affected before a single panel is placed.

Handing the excavation to another contractor puts the most consequential part of the job outside your control and creates a seam for responsibility to fall through. Site cuts, bulk excavation, rock breaking, drilling and deep footings are all run in house for that reason. One contract, one program, and no argument about whose fault the footing is.

Photographing what disappears

Because the buried work is what determines whether a wall lasts, the buried work is what gets documented. Drainage, aggregate and geofabric are photographed before backfill and the photographs are handed over with the job.

It is a small thing and it costs nothing. It also happens to be the only honest way to show a client what they actually paid for, on the part of the wall they will never see again.

How the business is meant to grow

The intention is a specialist company, not a one man band that happens to be busy. Retaining walls are the trade rather than one service on a list, and the business is being built so that the standard belongs to the company rather than to any individual on site.

That means documented methodology, the same specification on every job, and a crew that works to it. It is a slower way to grow than adding services, and it is the only way the quality survives the growth.

Where the approach comes from

Eastern Melbourne Earthworks is run by Shane Van Florestein, a registered building practitioner based in Lilydale. The building background is the reason the company treats a retaining wall as a structure with a permit pathway, a contract and an insurance position behind it, rather than as a product that gets installed.

That is context for how the work is approached, not the thing the company is built around. The standard is the point.