Building a Tricky Staircase

oh all right good morning everyone let's see on today's episode of did my girlie put gas in the truck oh she did look at that she likes driving the truck i don't mind her driving the truck what i do mind is not putting gas back in there after driving my truck where his eyes got to stop in the morning on my way to work uh anyways i actually don't know what we're doing really um i think uh we got staircase thing tim and alex we're working on that i'm going out like today's gonna be the last day of building it so getting out there for the last day um yeah i don't know i guess we'll see what happens all right uh so the process forum excavate out 30 inch 38 inches find out that one right your last one because that'll that's the width of the two we class five it pack the class five set the first one set the second one that's it [Music] now the unit the stair units we're using in today's video are actually designed to look like a rock but they're a poured stereo unit or pre-manufactured stair unit that's poured into a rock mold so the face of the step looks just like a rock but at the top of it is a true step so there's no difference in deflection you're not going to be having any trip hazards or any issues that you typically would encounter if you were using real stone now once we get the subsoil excavated out we've got to make sure to compact that because while alex was digging at the over extended his boom his bucket and dug a little bit too deep fluffed any of that dirt back in that can create a settlement issue that won't be apparent right away but will be apparent months or even years down the road so if you're ever driving around and you look at a retaining wall and instead of having a true flat top looks like it's doing a whoopty woo that's because somebody somewhere missed a soft spot in the base and it eventually catches up to almost every project you ever work on so you got to be real careful about how picky you are about that base material and since we're talking about base let's talk specifically about the material that we're using in this video this is called recycled class five and what this is this is actually repurposed concrete and asphalt that's been torn out of somebody's driveway or roadway been brought to a crusher plant and then it's ground up the largest particles are three-quarter inch in size and it goes all the way down to dust and this material has just enough clay binder so that when you compact it it packs up solid like concrete the screed pipes are nothing more than three-quarter inch black pipe bought from any big box store they're laid into ground and then everything is compacted and leveled off from those so the bottom of the next step will be the exact same height as the top of the previous step [Music] now one of the things i kind of breezed over is the fact that you will see us almost always do multiple lifts even when it's not called for in this case this is only an eight inch stair height tread but we still put the material in and two lifts one four inch lift and a second four inch lift that means that we're going over the entire area twice which gives us double the amount of chance to make sure that we're hitting everything although we could put this lifted in one single lift we found it's better to be safe than sorry put it in two lifts and compact it twice versus putting one fat lift compacted all once and hope you didn't miss any areas [Music] all right here you want to lift it up a little bit and i'll get it over where it needs to be yup we got a little bit of finagling but it won't be too bad i think we can get that hey sam i kind of nudged that one forward a little bit when i was i tried to scoot too close did it did it move it off too much or that was my bad i almost say it's good probably i might have just been this back one kind of teetering a little bit too since it got that crest that's still good it was three and a half before somewhere around there maybe a little over three and a half three and five eights maybe oh you're at four on each side oh really oh that's why i scooted the whole thing forward then let me check as long as they're even on both sides oh wait wait no we're uh probably that's uh three and five eights four no that's like uh what is that gonna be one two three four five six seven eight uh like three and nine sixteenths no no okay the excavator gets the stops 99 complete but each step still needs to be double checked and sometimes tweaked just to make sure that everything flows together in a very natural pattern and has a good feel just a good rhyme or rhythm so we double check everything we double check the faces we double check the batter we double check the level side to side we double check the level from front to back we double check the level between the steps and then once all of those checks and everything is passed then we move on to the next one man i burned the hell out of my hand on that exhaust twice uh no it doesn't have a throttle cable you gotta hit it on this we gotta we gotta go in the same way rip it [Applause] freaking snap yeah that's why it's so short yeah i just tied it freaking just tied it together it was pretty funny actually you know gave that thing a rip to freaking start somersaulted over [Music] so [Music] dammit so one of the things to make sure you're aware of is when you put in your very bottom stair tread you've got to get them right because that sets up the entire rest of the staircase because the bottom stair tread is the base for the second stair tread which is the base for the third the fourth the fifth the sixth the seventh so on and so forth so if you screw up that bottom stair tread you're gonna be fighting the rest of them but when you get those individual stair treads all the right level it makes laying the next ones out that much faster and easier so a stitch in time saves nine i guess that would be the saying for this video right a stitch in time saves nine [Music] and that's all we got for you on this one i hope you guys enjoyed the process if there's anything you want to see specifically in these videos you just got to speak to me let me know in the comments down below do you want more details less details do you want more job site videos do you want more of the drama like the crazy neighbor crap or what do you guys want to see and i'll start to try to work on some of that for you that's all we got for you on this one god bless you guys go get them i really do want to say thank you for hitting that thumbs up button i see you guys doing it and it goes a long way and uh thanks for commenting it does help the algorithm and i see you guys doing it just uh just for the sake of helping out so much appreciated to you guys for that thank you guys god bless go get em and we'll catch you guys on another one