Building a new retaining wall and sodding.

Good morning one and all. Today we're going to be fitting and building a tricky landscape and show you how we break it all down. But before we get into that, we got to let Trucker John vent about some traffic. All right. So, we were riding along riding with with the John the Trucker. Yep. And we were doing 65 having fun and then all of a sudden slammed on the brakes. We were just trucking along. We're bringing out uh the ASB and the new Miniac X to uh Blaine's site and we're like, "Oh crap, don't need to crush anybody holding a ton of ton of weight." It So now we're just stuck in traffic butting along. One stupid trooper with a car pulled over. That's what caused all of that. That's what caused all that. Yeah. Everyone's got to stop and gawk at whatever anybody else is doing on the side of the road. It wasn't even an accident. It was just a car parked on the side of the road. Yeah. Now, I know some of you going to throw Trucker John under the bus for saying that, but have you ever sat in traffic for 20, 30 minutes just to fi just to finally pull up and see that a a police officer has somebody pulled over on the side of the road? If I'm I've said this before, if you are a police officer and you've got to pull somebody over on the side of the road and it's busy traffic, pull them off on an exit ramp. If you can pull them off someplace, not just directly on the road, because all it does is create an even bigger traffic jam. Honestly, the camera did not do that hill justice. That is like quite a bit of slope that way and up that way. And the ASV just climbed up like nothing. They've been really busy while me and John are running around doing other things, getting all the materials and whatnot for BL and whatnot after delivering all the vehicles. But yeah, they got pretty much this wall starts right here. Got all the way down to where it's still intact. Yeah, no kidding. All the way to here. All right. So, what you're going to look at as we pull apart this retaining wall is the typical scenario that we run into and why we are replacing and repairing so many of them. So, you other landscapers, don't stop doing this. But if you're a customer, don't let them do this for you. What you're going to notice is these are hollow blocks. That means the core is from the bottom only. There's no way of core filling these things. And they have just a little tiny lip on the back of the block. So if this is the block, there's a little lip on the back of it lip. And that little lip is useless. When we actually use these blocks to base, we actually take a what's called a chipping hammer. It might as well be the back of a pliers. And we just tap that and that knocks the entire back off. So there's no connection method with these blocks at all. So, make sure if you are hiring a landscape company, don't allow them to put this in for you guys. They're doing a 8ft radius so that I don't have to do any cuts on the radiuses cuz 8 ft you can make just using a which is very very nice. By going with an 8ft radius, we can have a solid line on the cap units, meaning that the backs of the caps won't split or separate. We want to make sure that those caps are uniformly tight, whether that's as straight in a row or going around a radius or a curve. If it gets tighter than that, well, then that means we've got to start to do some custom cutting. So 8 foot is kind of the key measurement to keep us from custom cutting every single cap. What you know about me? What you about? You know about me. [Music] Now the easiest way to break down a bid is in phases. You can we do it but with demolition and excavation as phase one. That's tearing everything apart and prepping for the build. The build itself is phase two. whether that's a retaining wall, a paper patio, uh installing trees, or anything that is the new stuff that's going in place. And then phase three is the restoration. So that is putting everything back together with a nice like it's like buying a Christmas present, putting in a package, wrapping it up, and putting the bow on top of it with your card on the top of it. That's what the restoration does. Puts everything back in order. So, let's break this thing down a little [Music] further. Now, here's where it gets a little bit tricky. On phase one of every job, that's going to be different. You're never going to have the same retaining walls to write rip out, the same slopes to go down, the same amount of dirt to take out. that will always be different. But phase two on a retaining wall build will almost always be the same. Meaning you can create a boilerplate template to help guide you modify your numbers for a specific job. So let's break down exactly how we would do a phase 2 build uh bid on a retaining wall build. [Music] So, here's how you break down a retaining wall bit. It's your basic materials. It's your block. It's your rock. It's delivery of your materials. And it's the installation of your materials. It's those four nice little pieces of the puzzle put together. So, just to make life easy, let's say your block price is $10 a square foot. Now, you need your rock. And this is where most companies skimp. They think they're saving money. Worst possible thing you can do. Don't freaking skimp on your rock. Add more rock because it's super duper cheap insurance. If you are a landscaping company, put in more rock than you need to. But if you want to know the exact amount of right or rock to put in, it's 200 pounds per square foot. So let's break this down for you. If you have a 100 square ft wall, you multiply it by 200 and then you take that number and you divide by 2,000. And the reason you divide by 2,000 is you don't buy your stone on a price per pound, you buy it per ton. So, you're figuring out how many pounds you need to put into your wall. And the key factor is 200 lb per square foot, but you're buying it per ton. So divide by 2,000. You've also got to calculate in your travel time. That is the delivery of the materials to your job site. You seen Trucker John pissed off cuz he was stuck in traffic. Trucker John was delivering all of our materials. He had all of these guys waiting for him. So, uh, the delivery is a vital component. You've got to calculate in your delivery time and then your install. How long is it going to take you to install this? So, when you put those four pieces of the puzzle together, it should create a template that will help you go out and bid almost every single retaining wall job you do. But there's nuances to that. In this job, you're going to see that we're putting in geog grid. Geogrid means we've got extra excavation, we've got extra back fill, we've got extra compaction. So, we've got to start to take in those small fluctuations into our price. But once we have the generalized guideline on how to bid these things, we can then modify that on a job per job basis. If that doesn't help you out, then I don't know what will. So, give me a thumbs up if it does or a hell yeah in the comments. Hell yeah. Give me a hell yeah. [Music] All right. So, phase one was the demo and excavation. Phase two is the build. Now, phase three is the restoration. Now, you can't just leave your customer's yard in a mess all higgled piggly. Well, you can if you tell them ahead of time, but if you haven't done that, then you need to take into consideration the restoration. And that can be seed, it can be sod. In this case, we're doing sod. So, let's break down how we actually do that saw job. What we do is we measure the area and divide by nine. Oh, more math. Oh my god. Yes, you can do it. Simple math. It's length time width and then divide by 9. The key is is you're getting square feet, but you don't buy sod on a price per square foot. Again, you just don't do that. So that divide by 9 converts it to square yards. And that's how you can buy your sod. And that's also how you can charge for your [Music] sod. All right, that's it. We're all wrapped up. And as an aside to this video, I wholeheartedly support our police officers, our troopers, our military, our doctors, our nurses. My wife is a nurse, my uncle's a state trooper, and the fact that John called him a stupid trooper earlier in the video is just John getting emotional. It happens. Get over it. See you guys on the next one.