Building a flagstone wall and prepping for pavers day1

alright guys it's an interesting one today the boys don't have such a hot time out on their job site the site itself is so tight that they can't even turn around on it is much done today as we want to our dig I don't want to real fast but plus the city of st. Paul is throwing regulations down on them that doesn't allow them to actually leave a piece of equipment parked on to the street plus we've got rain coming in the forecast plus we come across an unexpected obstacle how can it be a bad day alright so here is what we got going on this all used to be a driveway the homeowner is wanting to turn this into like like a planting area she's a very eco conscience which I think a little cool with what she's got going on in like the backyard but what we're doing here today is we're gonna be building a little flagstone walk right through here with those guys to hold all this black dirt planting area back and then we're gonna turn this little area from here to the street you know a parking area the wall and parking pad will not be connected so each will be built separately this area was a driveway for nearly a hundred years so the material that's under there is hyper compacted so they don't want to disturb it any more than they have to how far down do we got to dig up here then for the wall although the wall in the paper parking spot are going to be completely separate Blaine still wants to do a rough cut on the top elevation of the pavers because that will determine the bottom elevation of the retaining wall he's got to be careful not to over dig or go too deep he doesn't want to disturb the subsoil so big ones on the bottom obviously yeah all right I'm gonna start starting to do those though so this dark looking material that the wall is going down on is called recycled class-five and this is a combination of both asphalt and concrete that have been ground up the largest pieces in it are you typically 3/4 inch in size and it's grown all the way down to a fine powder and that acts as a binding agent so when you compact this this material stiffens up hardest concrete although we don't normally use this as base under retaining walls on a small project like this it'll make to the building a natural flagstone retaining wall like this is kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces are actually meant to fit together you've just got to get them close some of the time all right okay now so we'll fit in here quitter typically a flagstone wall like this is a lot more difficult to install because none of the pieces actually are built to go together so it takes a little bit more interpretation of the stones when you're installing one of these things but on the flip side of that there are a lot more forgiving at the same time your bottom base course with natural stones don't have to line up to the same precision that you would use if you were building the same wall out of modular block so his blame lays out the songs Sam is running and grabbing him new ones and occasionally telling a story along the way I found out something cool that I didn't know this weekend I'm super allergic to those n95 s yeah I had one of them I had it on for well you know I was D spider in the basement and stuff I had it on for like three days yesterday I woke up my face was all purple and itching and stuff like that and then throughout the day from where I had it on you know I was like through here was just swelling up his all purple and stuff it took some benadryl and luckily that helped but dude I was looking like a monkey wait so these are actually scraps that the customer had left behind from projects she done around her house luckily she had enough big and small pieces combined that allowed us to build something that actually functioned and Blaine likes to do little touches of his own I got a bunch of stuff for the butterflies not so much so you might have noticed but as the boys are building up the wall they use smaller fragments of the stones to help support the larger ones as they play stuff Blaine gets the biggest heaviest pieces he can for that step unit and a lot of times a piece has to come out to get a different piece that will make the puzzle complete our wall is done with just a scrap pile of rock to choose from this was the best that we could pull off I'll put a little step in here for her she's a little Vance than our age yeah how long did that take like two hours yeah two hours the next step is to excavate for the parking pad but there's a fairly substantial challenge that they've still yet to overcome going on it's where we have to excavate down to is really gonna undermine the corner of this slab and really undermined this busted wall that they got so what we're gonna do so we're gonna have to build a small wall along here to hold all that earthbag and not undermining everything more than the first step will be to shaved the old driveway material off using the cat skid loader but when it comes to making the final sub cut we're going to switch and use the mini excavator simply because we don't want to drive on that sub base material any more than we have to because every time we put tracks on it we risk loosening it up so after we get the old material shaved off we'll make the final cut with the Mini X you'll see that in a minute [Music] drinking coffee oh geez I [Music] this parking pad we is not going to be flat it's actually going to have an angle throughout the entire thing to match up with the pitch that's going from the existing driveway up to the retaining wall so a string line is set up to make sure that we keep a consistent depth for our base material our sand and our pavers which ultimately will get laid [Music] so as Blaine is excavating down Sam simply measures from the string line down to the sub cut on top of that goes the base material on top of that goes the sand and then on top of that goes the pavers so he wants to make sure that the sub cut is right in the first place but before they get too far into the date they've still got a tricky corner they got to figure out here it's busy fishing down so we're gonna be below they can still do a little bit more of the excavation with the equipment before they've got to switch over and make a different plan and to make it even more interesting technically by the rules of st. Paul we're not allowed to park in front of our jobsite so someone has to man the truck the entire time for us to be able to load it when the guys are running heavy equipment like this they can't really hear each other so they typically communicate using hand signals which you'll see in just a moment alright so you want to be a foot [Music] he's just taking nice little scoops at a time that's weird we don't want to get any deeper than a foot rain is in the forecast and both Blaine and Tim need the exact same equipment on two different job sites so they put a plan together cuz I'm gonna need the dump trailer tomorrow to serve a project I could get maybe delay one more day you're gonna need it you know you'll use it in the morning cuz I'll need it right away I mean I'll need the mini X and the I didn't ever taken down you can have that I can start taking some trees down but it'd be nice to have a dump trailer but you're gonna need it a little bit longer yeah yeah you pick it up tonight so we ran the company for 20-plus years without ever owning a dump trailer and now that we have one they're finding it difficult to get by without it so you're gonna need it for another half a day he's not don't you yeah I mean they're also at the stage where they've got to address what they're going to do with that tricky retaining wall we know they can't dig it out with a piece of equipment and jeopardize undermining it so everything has to be done by hand okay I got that this all excavated down how they are definitely gonna need to do a thing over there after they've got the sub-base expose they immediately bring in new class-five and get that prepped and ready I think that's good go check alright class 5 using the class 5 for the base for the compaction you don't need the drainage like you would with the 3/4 clear behind the wall just cuz this finds we import new classified base even though it was an existing driveway there before simply because it gives us control we know exactly what material we're going to be installing our new paper driveway on and so this has to be levelled and compacted before it can be used before they hit it with a packer they're gonna put up their string line and make sure that they've got their elevations awesome so I mean the ArcLight that you're saying class 5 needs to be three inches three inches below so that's three inches below the string line yeah but they're finding out they're not quite there yet yeah and then an inch of sand and then the pavers and then packet yeah we're about six inches there it's about five and a half right there so they're still too deep and they don't have enough material to bring it up to the right grade that means they need to get more classified but before they do that they're going to pack and prep this to make sure that it's sealed just in case any bad weather comes before the next layer of classified can go down the papers show up ahead of schedule they're not quite to that stage yet so they've got to pull these off get them set to the side and out of the way the Hydra bucket has to go out to a grading site so the cat skid loader is gonna get retrofitted with one of our other buckets but for some reason it doesn't fit which I've never actually seen happened before it's a universal bucket but it is what it is right so Alex came and took the Hydra bucket was I supposed to bring us another bucket for the cat and he grabbed us the only one that doesn't fit on there so our day is kind of going to crap yeah I didn't realize when you're calling you said that we didn't have a have a bucket I was like so what that Hydra buckets here but he took that on so the days that kind of going to crap for everybody so this goal looking material is classified it's the exact same material as the recycle classify but this is made out of limestone it consists of three quarter inch rock which binds that will compact down so although it looks different it's the same material in essence while Alex runs and gets a bucket that fits the boy start tackling that tough retaining wall corner it's like how many of your five years ago I decided I couldn't find anyone to do it oh really really that's surprising to build the retaining wall underneath the existing retaining wall employees use a tarp so that they don't cross contaminate the excavation spoils with the new class five that goes down they only excavate out as much as they have to to install the new stones to help support the old wall actually they're old stones okay we are all wrapped up for the day I did not get nearly as much done today as we wanted to our dick I don't want to real fast but we got our first layer of class five in compacted and we got our little wall and over here yeah that is pretty much what we got down to date so yeah that's super great but is what it is I just have to hit it hard tomorrow alright guys make sure you stick around because on the next one we're gonna wrap this project up we're gonna show you how the pavers go down and how all of this ties together and that's our video for today god bless you guys go get em I hope whatever project you're working on the rains hold off the city lets you park on the right side of the street you have enough room to turn around and all those things that maybe make your life a little bit easier god bless we'll go get you we'll catch you on another one