Building a retaining wall #2 - "How we Base walls"

all right you guys well today is the grand wrap-up of this retaining wall we're going to show you guys how we lay in laid in these steps we're going to be basing out this retaining wall and wrapping this project up in today's video so let's not get too far ahead of the game let's back this up from where we left the other one off and keep the journey going all right guys we're going to be looking at a complicated integrated stair system built right into the retaining wall we're going to show you how we did this thing this is kind of a unique one for us but every job is unique in some way right so you can see what the guys use so alex what are these stair steppers these are precast right not natural stone the versus steppers the versasteppers and so what that does is that gives us the ability to have a true flat top and a true flat bottom although it looks like a rock face type of material in a natural stone it doesn't have the variables that a natural stone has because you just installed the sidewalk system with natural stone and what a flippin nightmare that was yeah it was all over the place it was because it was up and down and sideways because true stone doesn't have a true top like this i mean this even is a little bit textured but it's mostly flat right and it gives you the ability because look at we are leveraging what we're doing putting it uh one step on top of the next step so we're leveraging the weight and support of the retaining wall and then behind it look at what we're doing we're building the base this is all base all support for the stairs so that we're all we've got this put on to a good solid platform and this is three-quarter clear and guys the newest member of the crew is our art say hi to the guys so we've got a new team member but the wall is coming along we'll just take a look we've got blaine down on the bottom basin blaine have you done a how-to base yet on the video yet yeah all right so let's show you guys how blaine vases we'll set the camera up and we're going to walk through one of these right now okay so what blaine's doing is he has to level each and every black plane you want to just show them and we can just walk through this now so i get the base fairly close to being level before i put the block in um and i'll actually use the level two video was created a little bit just to get real close enjoy just drop the block in and it's level that way a little high in this corner but we're still above this block that means i can hit it in the position yep without having to and you want to hit it into position so when you initially place your block you want it just a titch higher because you want to settle it down into its resting place and then that has to be perfectly level not just with the block next to it but all on its own yep otherwise you could be going down exactly and then another thing to take into consideration is the height of your retaining wall so if you've got an eight foot tall retaining wall that means you're gonna have four layers of grit in there and that can lift the back of your block up but this is the face it can lift the back of your block up a little bit so sometimes we'll even compensate depending on the height of the wall with the batter or the bubble let's take a look at what i mean so blaine's got the batter of the bubble blaine you want to show more level is so you can see how he's lifting up that back so he's got this going in but not too aggressively in because we're only going five feet yeah and if you go too aggressively in you can lose everything on the bottom yep the bottom can shift out and i actually had this argument with one of my project foremans well before you where he liked to go super aggressive on it and i told him the exact same thing you and i are singing and it did i did it it did the bottom just we weren't even done building it the bottom just big big rain came and it washed around the end of it and the whole end of it came out and the rest of the wall stayed in place so you got to be super careful that you get that right and then towing them in as well as another big thing and then don't touch them see i'm sitting on the block right now but i'm sitting on two block i would never sit on a base block you never step on a base block too easy to move it around you gotta get them towed in you gotta get them towed in so that's the key level the block individually get it a titch higher than the blocks that are adjacent to it and then you level this block with its sister block right next to it and then once that one is set then you keep going down down the line that's how you base those blocks another thing that i do want to talk about is uh so the tools he's using just a dead blow hammer a five pound i believe that's a five or an eight pound um and then you're level make sure you i don't know how picky are you about the level i'm not i'm not that picky as long as i can see it from the top right because those ones that had the heavy duty ones yeah you couldn't see from the top yep it's hard to and you bang them anyway you drop them anyway they're a throwaway tool you gotta you gotta keep refreshing your levels because once that goes you're all your work is gone right so don't be afraid to just toss the level if you're ever worried about it um and then your base material is the same as your backfill your drainage zone three-quarter clear some people use class five but here's the thing this three-quarter clear allows the water to migrate through the base and then this three-quarter clear you can see we've actually got a compactor on it we compact that base material and it can have water flowing straight through it without it ever compromising the integrity of the wall where class five has the fines and although the fines do tend to bind and it doesn't shift or move very often the fines are still there this should have all the fines removed so just the opportunity for the fines to wash out doesn't exist with this another thing that you can do is you can put cement concrete concrete down and put a concrete leveling pad we do not use that for the reason that we just showed you because we need a lot more control over our blocks than what even a screeded off base will allow us to do it doesn't allow us to individually adjust each block to compensate for the height of the wall the amount of grid that may be going in and just to get it dialed absolutely in you can see that the base when you base a wall like this it will take as long for an individual good baser to base as it will be for two or three man crew to backfill up two to three feet tall and compact it [Applause] so let's just watch blaine do one block without saying anything let's just let you guys kind of just take this in uh [Music] yep i do actually i think i had like four while blaine is facing joey is slagging the block off and that's basically just smoothing out the tops pretty close to level looks like it's coming down a little bit if you go just a lot all this block is driving weight on the scent compared to measuring both of them so it almost looks like it's pretty close to level a little bit lower [Music] but you could get this corner to be level but this block should be dipping down diving down over here check both both corners okay [Applause] sometimes they're tricky aren't they sometimes they are especially when you're on camera [Music] all right well i'll let you keep working on that so what blaine does is on the back side of the blocks to make just to level everything out you can see he runs that level all the way he uses a switches to a four foot level and then everything on the backside is is a straight face as well he doesn't use the front side because it's got a rough face right so if you look right here if you use that put that level on the front of it then he's not necessarily as accurate yeah so like right here you can see this yeah this bump right here throws it off so that'll throw you off if you're trying to use the front but on the back side it's a machine finished edge so that's why we use the back side of the block we also rope we also use what's called a rope trick i don't know if these guys get you ever use the rope trick when you're backfilling aggregate rope trick nothing never saw it never seen the rope trick on commercial sites when we would have 100 to 200 feet to to rock we would take a rope and stick it in the pin slots all the way down and then we could just put the rock in place and if it got on top of the block we didn't care because we flipped the rope out and all the rock would disappear out of our pin slots that makes a lot of sense yeah it's just a but if you don't have to do it you don't have to do it you know even just you know short little pieces like that would help yeah instead of having to pick the rock out of there yep yep because that is the sucky part about these blocks is getting rock in there getting rock in there and especially when it's this size rock so it fits just like that and then you gotta get reach in and you gotta physically pick it out but that is a minor point overall for all of the benefits that you get with this block i'd never use any other block personally but i don't know you've been basing for as many years as i can remember blaine what would you like what would you use if you had your druthers if we could pick it up would you my own house did you use this at your own house higher stone oh you use the big ones okay [Music] so [Music] all right so the next thing we're going to do is actually set one of the precast stone stairs so the front of the block he's got a pad in place he just wants to kiss it not crush it [Music] don't get under that block [Music] hey art you're in a pinch point you know art whatever you do don't get yourself trapped in pinch points where you can't get out if a piece of equipment does its own thing because we've seen equipment blow hoses crash down just be very careful about pinch points please and thank you [Music] so he's already got that all leveled okay [Music] we decided [Music] 99 of the work is in the preparation so although that looked pretty easy it wasn't easy to make sure that everything was set and ready so that he could make it look easy as he set the block in place so [Music] all right you guys well here she is all wrapped up and complete we've still got a few details to work out but we've got the retaining wall built up assembled the new driveway is in place we've got the steps you can see how we got these all wrapped up we had some rain come in last night and we still don't have all of the vegetation re-established but once that gets established in then we won't have any more issues with a little bit of soil washing over the face like that but you can see that we've got the grass growing and the downspouts aimed right there are the outlets for our drainage aimed right above uh driveway height and that's it i hope you guys enjoyed today's journey i hope you guys enjoyed seeing some of the the detail work that we like to do how we base out our retaining wall i know i've never done that before where we do it in real time and just let the camera roll so if that helps you guys out which i'm hoping it helps some of you guys they're maybe getting into retaining walls for the first time seeing that in real time i think at least for me that would help me out so i hope it helped some of you guys out and you still found it interesting and not too slow so that's all you got i got for you guys on this one god bless go get him you guys and we'll catch you guys on another project see you later you guys have a good one