Creating a yard off a SKETCHY slope

so if you guys are just tuning in on the last dirt monkey Adventure the boys ran across a monstrous stump and instead of being able to dive right into the retaining wall they had to dive into figuring out how to get that thing out of there without the right equipment they did muddle through it and there it's out and if you want to see exactly how that went it's just one video before us but today we've got a giant hole that we've got to fill so Sam's going to explain how we fill that up and then we've got to get the actual project the reason we came out out here started so let's dive right into it all right I got that stump out of there most of the roots well most of the ones we got the stuff out of here that's going to be in the way for our wall the rest of it is going to stay where it's at so yeah that was that was a little sketchy when we were snapping that trunk off we had our you know we had our little burm up here to catch it in case it rolled and that sucker just about went over that thing but it didn't and that's all that matters so next bit is we're going to start filling in this freaking massive crater we got here the homeowner had whole bunch of this along the side of the house there's some more over there that we have to get rid of and what we're doing with it is we're going to use it as fill cuz it's angular you look at it it's angular what that means is you pack it and it all locks together so it will make pretty decent fill the homeowner right now their AC is back over there around the corner and they're moving it over here so what they would like oh what we're going to do is we're going to build a little kind of Boulder wall here to lift this up it's going to be like 6 ft by you know 6 ft just a little pad that they can set the AC on tap of and all those I'm not a hvat guy so I don't know what terminology is but they have those like pads with the brackets that you know you mount on the side of the house and those can support I know that those can support quite a bit of weight but he wants to do a little Boulder wall thing which is which is cool be nice quick easy little stacking rocks type deal all right guys so got a little Boulder wall done yesterday so dude can get his AC put up on there uh so we're going to start digging base for little wall today so we're just shooting our elevations getting the string line all set up and just started rocking in a rolling [Music] sections of this wall will be over 9 ft tall so that means it will be fortified with four to five layers of geogrid each layer of geogrid extending horizontally behind the face of the wall between 9 and 11 ft but that also means all organic material that is behind the face of the wall has to be stripped and removed [Music] holy crap look at all these freaking ants what the hell that's a pile of them right there it's a pile of them right there too they want to see the footing yeah put a little bit of a kink in the plant usually they're cool we can keep building usually they're usually they're just cool with the picture but he sounded younger so maybe more oh he's a younger one that's it right there old guys are like yeah well it was like I was saying dude my my dad always had problems with the inspectors up in this neck of the woods going to keep working on digging over there Joey and I are going to get these hostas dug out it's the uh home owners moving the air conditioner over to where we put that wall and they were saying they want to add patio here so the AC guys are you know they're going to have to trench and all that stuff to get it moved and hopefully we got to talk to them but hopefully they can run their run their lines right on the right under the edging therewi it's going to be getting in the way of the base for a patio and stuff like that [Music] removing the hassas his perfect job to keep the guys out of the work Zone Lane has to cut that lower Bank down enough so that we can get the first row of geog Grid in this is not just for the bottom row of block this is also for the lowest layer of geogrid that gets installed [Music] oh it looks like we sprung a leak boy oh yeah that's a good leak where is that coming from oh that line right there yeah it's this one right there it looks like need um [Music] the large flat zone is the footing for the geog GD the smaller trench is the footing for the face of the retaining wall now I want you to watch just how slowly and carefully he digs the bottom for the retaining wall because if he goes too deep the soil has to be put back in place and compacted so it's fairly critical that we get this step right so we don't get any future [Music] settlement damn it [Music] we don't dig out the entire footing for the retaining wall all at once because if we get a thunderstorm coming through there that trench will trap water so we only dig out as much as we can safely base and fill back in below this bottom layer of block is just supposed to be 6 in of rock but you'll probably notice that we double or triple that in many places and we also widen out the base as well it's very cheap insurance to make sure that that wall doesn't have any deflection down the row all right so we got us based out to right about the halfway mark um we're going to switch gears a little bit and start building up along here and get this corner built up a couple of courses and uh yeah so it's been so freaking hot for the last I don't know a couple weeks up here um and with that you know the soil is really really dry we're getting a whole lot of dust and then when it's when the soil's like this dry you know you can't really quite get the you can't really get it good compaction on it so Jo going down and kind of just wetting everything down a little bit that's uh kind of the same thing that we do oh there's bla kind of the same thing we do with the uh recycle class 5 now if you watch you'll see that the guys are careful to step over the block but not on it that main course of block that's down still could have deflection if you put too much pressure on any one point it's not until the second course of block is down pinned and locked in place can you start to walk on the actual retaining wall because now you're Distributing the weight over a larger surface area instead of having pinpoint pressure on any one point on the base [Music] course all right now let's go a little simpler here do you see that black material laid out horizontally behind the retaining wall that's what geog grid is it kind of reminds me of orange snow fence but it's not and it can't be substituted and it can't be laid any just which way it's got One Direction where its sheer strength actually functions if you lay geogrid out the wrong way it's like not having any geogrid in at all because it's not actually holding the wall the correct way so as you watch this wall grow you're going to see us continuing to add layers but we're adding those layers in strategically geogrid gets placed every 2 ft of vertical height so in this image right here there's actually three layers of geogrid going in and the wall is approximately 5 ft tall so the bottom course of grid is all the way at the bottom and then the remaining two courses of grid make up for that difference but the wall is far from being done yet all right you guys I want to jump in here because I think this is a great opportunity for your questions so you've seen how we got this project launched and started now I'm guessing there's going to probably be some questions that you guys have that I wasn't able to address in this video but we've still got a lot more of this retaining wall to go so if you guys ask your questions down below I can maybe start to address them in the next video so if I miss something and you want to see it hit me up down below and we'll go from there and as always I want to say thank you for smashing that like button goes a long way thank you for commenting thank you for helping the algorithm I see you guys doing it and I really appreciate it so um that's all I got for you on this one I'm looking forward to communicating with you down below and as always I hope that whatever you're doing turns out way better than you ever expected it could God bless you guys go get them we'll see you next time