Cutting in a Driveway and Building a Privacy berm #1

good morning good evening good afternoon you guys today we're going to be starting a brand new project we're up at shangri-la douche and this is a property that i bought last year that's in dire need of help the former driveway or current driveway is basically what i call a bobsled run so we've got a really steep hill and then everything just straight down last year i re-graded that to make it so it was accessible temporarily but this year we're going to be putting in a primary driveway something more permanent we're going to be doing something just a little bit different we're going to be experimenting with today's job and let me just explain what i mean by that if i was going to be doing this for one of you guys you called me up on the phone and said hey i got a steep driveway dangerous property i need to cut something in and change it what i would do for you is going to be different than what i would do for me now what i would do for you some of you guys may recognize and i'll just walk you through the process of what i would do for a customer is i would strip down all of the vegetation until i got to the non-organic layer and then depending on what kind of soils we would have i would start layering and sandwiching the soil back in and putting in geogrid if i felt that it was necessary to stabilize the soils and then i would put that grid in every two feet of vertical height and as i was placing the soil i would be compacting it probably six to ten inches and i would be using compression compaction if the the conditions allowed me to meaning basically compression compaction is i would be using a skid loader to drive over it and put in micro thin lifts if you guys have watched my pool demos in the past it's the exact same process just wash rinse and repeat it'll work for a road it will work for a pool demo and it also works for retaining walls that's what i do for you guys this is my own property and i said we're going to experiment and we are now we are basically living on a giant pile of sand up here in northern minnesota everywhere you go you are contending with shifting moving soils and so what we really need is something to uh as a cohesive binder aka the geogrid would be perfect if i'm doing it for you but i don't want to try to do that for myself i'm going to experiment and we're going to find out together whether this experiment passes or fails over the course of the next year maybe 18 months we're going to be able to see how well it holds up and let me explain what i'm doing here my entire property along this bank is just a steep bluff down you can't see it because it's basically just outlined in vegetation at this point but that's a cliff steeper than the cliff that you that we see right here then we have this flat area then we've got another steep cliff and then it goes back up the entire prop the road kind of starts to work its way up so as i look at the layout of this property where my current driveway is they put it in at the absolute steepest part of the property if they had taken that same driveway and put it in over here the property has a 20 foot difference in elevation we're talking about a lot less grade a lot gradual or driveway a lot easier to gain access to i don't know why they originally didn't do it and that's what we're going to be doing if i was going to be putting in a driveway on a steep slope i would create what's called an s curve or a switchback so as you're going up or down the driveway you're using the the steepness across it the long ways across it to lessen it so you're not just straight going down you're s curving back and forth one of the things that we're going to be doing different with this one is we're going to be using the trees as our geogrid we're going to be using the trees we let me let me tell you a little history it's called the cord wood road and we've been doing cordwood roads up here for 70 plus years successfully and a cordwood road is where they take down the trees they take down the wood and they lay it down and then they use the sand and the native materials to encapsulate it and up here that works beautifully because of the kind of materials that we're working with it actually the wood it encapsulates the wood and as the wood slowly degrades underneath there the decay process is completely changed entirely and as that would slowly decays it actually stitches the soil together you can get a cord wood world we've had cordwood roads last over 50 years successfully up here if it ain't broke don't fix it now i would never build a cord wood road for one of you guys but i will build a similar approach for myself so as i'm looking back through here i've got all of this timber vegetation this is actually right where the asv got stuck and it started to slide down that bank we're going to be cutting our path our road in across so we're going to be doing a modified switchback but instead of removing all of the organic material we're going to be laying it down and encapsulating it basically that's a super fancy word to say burying it but it's also an engineering word it's an engineering term there's a lot of landscape retaining walls that we encapsulate simply because we borrow the strength from one wall we face it with another wall and we have double the strength maybe not double more strength than if we physically remove something and then built it again and it's the same process that we're going to be doing here we're going to knock everything down and we're going to cut straight in and we're going to build our road going right straight through the woods all right guys well the first thing we're going to do on this property is start to clean up and build the burn so we're going to outline where the brim is going to go and since this is the area that we've determined to make the berm everything that we don't want shown the top of the berm is going to go in the bottom of the cleaning all these treaties this is good organic material sandy material so we can definitely use these trees to our advantage so before i even start the driveway i start the privacy burn i figure good fences make good neighbors and if i can keep my mess out of their eye shot maybe that'll make them a little bit happier so i want to build the privacy berm up and give it a chance to start growing as soon as possible you'll also notice that i'm intentionally sticking fallen trees into the privacy herb as those things break down and decay that just tiny bit of extra organic material will help that berm to establish wildflowers and wild vegetation on its own hey guys let's just take a look we've been about an hour maybe two hours into this uh berm so far and we're about four foot tall not very wide i mean long i guess this way probably about about 35 40 feet in there but we're about yeah half the height of what i'd like to be so i like to bring her up a lot taller than that which means i've also got to go wider i'm trying to make it so it's a manageable berm i can climb it top it and go down on the other side we don't have any peaks we don't want we don't want peaks like that we want nice flat round berms so we probably got about i'm gonna guess to do this berm and make it look halfway decent eight to ten hours of uh work in here to do we're one to two hours into it so let's keep this uh let's keep this train rolling right three two one [Music] running a skid loader is probably one of the funnest games you can play and if i was going to be doing this on a regular job site i would be sorting the soils as i was digging them out if i was encountering black or organic material i would be setting those to the side and using them as a top dressing but unfortunately pretty much everything up in my neck of the woods is sand so it all gets mixed together into the burb [Music] there we go that's looking good right there this property had been neglected for decades zero to no maintenance well just no maintenance has been done on it and you see that tree that's leaning there that technically was a widow maker and it was being held up by another tree and it had to go all right you guys well the widowmaker is down i don't like how she went down but i'll be straight with you guys i didn't really try to make it do anything i got plenty the middle of the woods it doesn't really bother me if it goes left right as long as it doesn't go on top of me um so now i'm gonna try to get sneaky snake this bad boy out of here yeah i don't really want it up in here so i want to harvest this material right here so let's just try to get it out so now you're more than welcome to go ahead and tell me all the different ways techniques and tools i should be using to move this tree but understand this the only thing i have available at my disposal is this kubota skid loader with a bucket i don't have a brush bucket i don't have a beak i don't have chains i don't even have a chainsaw available i have this skid loader and this bucket and that's it by leaving the root ball on i can stick my bucket into that nasty old tangled mess of roots hook it in there and just use that to drag my tree to where i want it to go right what the heck all right well you know what we still got a couple hours of daylight let's see what time it is here and i want to work past 7 30 tonight what time is it 7 10. damn time flies anytime i hop in a skid loader let's cut that back and add it over there and then at the end of the day we're going to wrap this one up and see how much progress we made [Music] all right guys let's uh shape up this burn before we call the day about 7 30. i don't want to leave this all right so let's go see what we got we got the berm up that's got to be a good six seven foot from this side up and from over there these were over the top of the loader so that runs 10 8 10 feet roughly from the bottom here to the top there but that doesn't mean we're done we still got a ways to go because visually we want to have more security and privacy that's going to call it for this video for today tomorrow is a new day and what we're going to be doing is bringing you a video uh every day that we work on this project so we're just going to show you the daily update and we're going to start it from one and just keep going right along through to the end so that you guys can just tune in and watch how this site gets developed so i hope you enjoyed this one today we knocked down trees we dug dirt we built the privacy berm we set up the pattern so that we know what we're going to be doing where we're going to be going with our new road that we're cutting in we got a ton of work to do here so i hope you guys enjoy videos like this if you do the thumbs up goes a long way and let me know what you want to see next you want to see more privacy berm do you want to see uh do you want to see the actual road getting cut in how we build that or just throw a little bit of everything at you i don't know you tell me that's all we got for you on this one god bless you guys hope you enjoyed it i enjoy hanging out with you i enjoy anything that has to do with the skid loader too so that helps uh it's let's see what time is it here let's find out if we we stayed on time oh shoot 7 43. oops i said we were gonna be done by 7 30 tonight 7 43 pretty close i don't know can you really count it as work when you enjoy it i don't know that's it god bless you guys go get them we'll catch you on another one