Crazy Neighbor Calls the Building Inspector on us

Good morning, afternoon, or evening you guys. Whatever time it may be. Today we have an adventure. Sometimes it's the jobs that make things exciting, but sometimes it's the customers, and sometimes it's people that live next to the customers lately that keep making our jobs interesting. And yeah, it sounds like that that lady they got next to him is causing them a lot of problems with this. But today is kind of the cumulation. Cumulation. Cumulation. That's a tough word for a pock to say. Cummalation. That's probably a bad word. Don't Google that. Anyway, today is the accumulation of this neighbor's efforts to undermine things that we're doing. It gets to be an interesting day today. And if you guys end up liking this video, do me a favor and hit that like button. Goes a long way. And let's uh and let me hear from you in the comments down below. But let's get this adventure started. All right. So, one of my very good buddies swears by the Milwaukee saw blades. I have always been more of a Diablo kind of guy myself, but I picked up Milwaukee. It's a wrecker. And then my favorite, it's the demo demon. Both have the carbide teeth on it. Same size. They got the same TPI. So, what kind of blades do you guys like using? and not not because of the logo on it, like what kind of blades do you guys like to use? Comments. So, the first day we started this project, the neighbor came out and mounted security cameras all along her property facing our way. The guys noticed other strange things happening throughout the job. But if you look really closely on that gray house behind us, you'll see an electrical box and on top of that, you'll see a security camera from the neighbor watching us. On this site, there isn't a lot of spare room. So, we've got a lot of pinch points as we go around this corner. That's a definite pinch point. We don't have any excess room. So, that little K Cabota sure does come in nice. So, what you may be paying attention to is we've got two packers on this project. And right now, what they're doing is putting in a deeper lift. That means they can't use our 150 pound plate packer to compact a lift this thick. They're going to opt to use our thousand pound plate packer. And the reason they're able to use that is because as they get closer to the top, it's a little easier to handle. So if they've got to be able to pull it out, they can chain it and yank it up a bank a lot easier and send it into position a little bit better as we get closer to the top. So the lifts can then get thicker. So, both packers look almost identical. The 1000lb plate packer and the 150lb plate packer are both plate packers, which means they use a solid plate to do the compaction for them. Not to be confused with sheep's foot packers, jumping jack packers, rolling packers, and a variety of other compactors available out on the market. She's just kind of going where she wants to go. something. Now, you watch Blaine carefully dig this base out. When I say carefully, he didn't want to oversize or dig too deep. He wanted to get it to the exact right elevation not to disturb the soils underneath. And even though he took his care and time to do that, we still run the 150lb plate packer over it just to compact down any unfinished areas that may have loosened up before the base material goes down. Next bit also important. You got to clean these suckers out. [Music] Okay. So, obviously, you know, you don't want nothing on the top of the blocks. You don't want anything in these channels where the pins go, too, cuz it can make it not pin all the way. Um, so yeah, once you got that cleaned off, you know, you want to check like right here, this is going to have to come off. It's a little bit of little bit of dirt, but that's enough to throw the course off. So, need to get my scrape. Now, this is where you have to be picky and where a lot of guys aren't, unfortunately. any kind of obstructions on the top of these blocks will be like the princess and the pee, right? You got all these mattresses and a little tiny pee on the bottom mattress and that's going to throw everything off. Well, on a retaining wall, if you let any obstructions be on those blocks, as the wall gets taller, you're going to start to see it. You won't see it if you only stack one or two courses on top of the obstruction. But if you've got 10 courses or worse yet 20 or 30 courses to go on top of an instruction, by the time you get to the top, your retaining wall is failed. This is where you've got to babysit every single course and make sure that you get those blocks clean, especially where you lay down grid because the grid will trap the debris and not let you get it cleaned off right. So, you've got to do this step before you lay the grid down. As you can see on the row below it. Rock is cheap, but fixing a retaining wall isn't. This base is not in the bid. But we know as contractors, if we put this much base material down, there's not much of a chance we're going to get a call back. Hey, something happened to my wall in 3 to four to 5 years. This is cheap insurance for us. So, we overkill the base. We overkill the drainage zone. When you overkill those two zones, your chance of success goes up a lot in our opinion. A lot of guys skimp on the rock. Don't [Music] question came up on one of our other videos. Could you back fill the entire retaining wall, including the reinforcement zone, with rock? And the answer is absolutely. In fact, one time we built a 5,000 square ft retaining wall that had to hold up a parking ramp. But to make sure no water got trapped between the ramp and our retaining wall, we backfilled the entire drainage zone. all 14 ft of it with rock. We brought in over 2,000 tons of rock just for the drainage zone on that one wall [Applause] alone. I guess You want me to throw a scrap around that one? Pull it out a little bit or I don't know. Be able to get it. So, this K Cabota SBL65 has a flip up door, which I have had many skid loaders with flip up doors and never liked a single one of them until this one. This flip up door so far hasn't fallen down and hitten anybody in the head and allows us to actually work during the summer and if it gets dusty and nasty out to still pull the door down. On our other skid loaders with the swing out door, you're either stuck with the door closed or off. At least the flip up door gives us an option. Just beat them mfers in there. It's coming piece of crit. Okay, look closely. You can see exactly where Sam is beating the pins down. But these blocks have what's called an automatic setback. And what you can't see is those pins that he's beating down right now. He's beating into the slot that's directly behind the pin holes. So you guys see that long slot? That's where he's getting that pin to fit. And as long as that pin fits anywhere in that slot, you're golden. That's what she said. Then if you have them lined up right, you should just be able to drop them right in. Just like that. They drop right in like that. They're usually where they need to be. I still like to go through and give them a little check just to make sure. We seat the pins. And that means we basically pound them down into the block below. They're not hovering or floating. They've got full contact with the block below. All right. Now you got your pins in. Next step is, and this is an important one too cuz it makes it easier to straighten them. Make sure the blocks are out as far as they will go. So, like I said, it just makes makes my life easier when we're going and straighten them. So, let's talk about that move you just seen Sam do after he kicks the block forward. And the reason he's doing that is he's then evening out the set back on all of the blocks by sliding them all the way forward. But there's another step that still has to be placed. Just because the setback has now been evened out, we still have to run a string line on every single row to make sure that we get the blocks themselves to all line up perfectly in a row like so. It's a tough Yeah. Yeah. Well, the homeowner decided to tackle this himself last year. Oh, I'm like, this is a big job to tackle by yourself. So, he ripped out almost all the timber and he had the block sitting here and he just finally said, I can't do it. I'm like, no. I mean, even if he had a bunch of buddies and had a bunch of equipment, still be a bear. And he said I I couldn't afford the equipment because he needed this stuff out here and he couldn't keep it out here just without using it. So, no, we're uh staying under four feet and beefing it up for him. So, sounds good. Well, I'm going to just keep across in the end. No, and I know that the neighbor's concerned about Yeah, the building official got an email. Look at Yeah, it sounds like that that lady they got next to him is causing them a lot of problems with this. It was just open for a whole year. So, he had it dug out. So, we got plenty of rock behind there. Good foot, foot foot and a half train. So, Well, it should work out good then. Yeah. Hopefully it stays there. Level his yard up a little bit. Yeah. He usually had some problems. Yeah. They don't see. We had u some porches built onto town houses. Uhoh. But they have no backyards. I mean, it is just the slope is, you know, twice as steep as this. You can't hardly stand back there. Well, so the porches required 24in footings. Well, eventually the footings started to go. Oh, you want to hear you want to hear the footings? You want to hear something wild about some footings? Them over there when they were getting their sketchy walls built, they had it was like kind of like a fourseason kind of thing there where that porch was. The guys cut the footings off and then it fell down. It detached from the house as it likes to do. Fell down into the road. Oh, wow. You imagine making that call? Nope. No, I would have liked to see I would have liked to know what the thought process was of Yeah, let's just cut these suckers out of the way. Yeah. What are these doing? Yeah, we don't need these. Commercial building years ago they were going to take down. It was kind of out on the north side of Plymouth before there's any development. And uh so the contractor comes in, gets a demolition per permit, and they start working about two days later, comes back in and he goes um Yeah. Uh we we've got to get a permit for explosives cuz well the footings they found the footings were in some places 6 ft wide. What the heck? 6 ft high. Wa. That's a chunk of concrete right there. And uh so it was like well you know I I guess you if you really wanted to you could break them up with equipment but you'd break the hell out of your equipment. Yeah. Yeah. So they were just like no we'll hire a guy. We're gonna blow them up. It's like, well, we don't do that. So, get explosives for especially in the city. No, it it looks good. I mean, it's not We usually, especially on something like this, kind of measure them from finish grade. Okay, sounds great. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Take it easy, man. What happened with this is that lady right there called them in on us. There has been like Okay, just crazy stuff going on over there on that other side of the fence. Well, I got I got a couple of stories about about them over there from the homeowner that we'll touch on a little later cuz it's a wild ride. [Music] Yeah. [Music] Yeah. All right, let's see what we can do. Do you realize it took me like 20 minutes to do that one? It was It was perfect. We should we should have started it back there. So now with the retaining wall done and the finished landscaping beginning, we've got to undo a little bit of the work that we've done. What I actually mean is all of the structural field soil that we've brought in has been placed and compacted to make sure that the wall doesn't move. But that's not going to allow for any vegetation to reestablish. It would be like trying to grow grass on concrete. You can do it, but nobody wants to use that much water. So, we've got to till up that top layer of soil, and we're going to use the hydro bucket to do that, but that still won't be enough. We've got to bring in black dirt and then incorporate everything back together again. [Music] Some of you guys may be looking at doing soding in your own yard at some point this spring. And coming down the pipeline, we're going to have a video showing exactly all of the details on how we do our soding projects because there's more to it than what you're seeing right here. [Music] Zach came sprinting into the back and said, "Grab your camera." So, generally that's not something good. What the Oh, what the hell? He went like that this morning. That's not good. I don't have I don't have my impact set with me. I don't got I don't have anything. Actually, I might, but that's what one, two, three, four, five. I don't think I I don't think I got anything deep enough either. Five of those are There's two three of those holding this tire on. You check the other ones. All right, they're working loose over there, too. Just one, but I'm not sure about the rest of them. I would just hit them all. I'm going I'm going to Oh, man. Look at that. Yeah, this one is too. What the hell? You I kind of backed it off a little bit. Well, still. Yeah. I mean, if you can do that with your hand, that's not good. Actually having the lug nuts come loose like that's not unusual at all. And in fact, right at the factory when we pulled it out, the first thing they told us is make sure that we stop often and doublech checkck those lug nuts. And this is exactly why. So if you guys have a trailer out there, every now and then it wouldn't hurt to double check them. And if you got to tighten them up, get a deep enough socket that you're not going to be stripping the ends off of them on them. This socket that Sam's using is better than nothing to get us back to the shop. But we've got to do these things right and seat them with a deep socket. All right. So, we got all those tightened up. I didn't have a deep socket for the impact and kind of needed one, but it worked. Just got to make do with what you got sometimes. So, we're going to follow Blaine right on down to the yard. So, I guess if it came down to it and he drops a tire, I'd rather have him hit my truck than somebody else. Oh, there's [Music] [Applause] right, you guys. I hope you enjoyed today's video. So, this wraps up our retaining wall series, but we have a paver project coming right down the pipeline. We're going to walk you through how we do those. We're also going to be regrading 101y old driveway. We're going to be installing a boulder retaining wall using some pretty large boulders. We're talking about 4 to 6 ft large boulders. Makes this stone right here look like a small one. So, we got a lot of very cool projects. If you like projects, if you like equipment, if you just like going on adventures, doing a lot of different things, hit that subscribe button. I try to bring you guys along with and make you feel like you're right there with us. And I hope I succeed. And I hope you guys have an awesome I don't know when you're watching this. If it's the weekend, make that awesome. If it's during the week, I hope that's awesome for you, too. God bless you guys. Go get them. Hit that like button and we'll see you on another one.