How to Measure Estimate and Install Sod and Turf

it's all about sod today how to measure sod we're going to cover how to measure regular and irregular yards how to bid sod so we're going to cover estimating and then at the end of the video we're going to go over a few tricks for installing it things that you may not think of a lot of you may uh know a lot of this information some of you may not so get ready cuz here we go first thing we're going to talk about is the measuring the side this is critical to estimating let's say that you are going into and in this case best case scenario you have a square yard okay it's perfectly Square I don't know how well you can see it but that's a square that's the best I can draw let's say this yard is 10 by 20 ft okay the formula is 10 * 20 to figure out the area gives you 2 200 square ft okay what you do with that is you have to convert this number over to square yards because that's how side comes is in a square yard so then you take 200 square yards and divide that by n so once you've divided it by 9 that gives you 22 square yards and it's as simple as that but what happens if you don't come into a perfectly square yard let's go through a scenario that you may see Let's do let's just make let's just do a weird shape I don't care let's just do any kind of uh maybe it's a you got a skinny portion of a yard and a fat portion of a yard and none of it is square you break it into squares it's as simple as that so in this case in this yard you may go look at this is kind of this irregular shape is kind of a square and You' be a little long on some a little short but you break it into as close of a square as possible and let's just call this one 40 by 10 okay so you break this portion of the yard up and then you look at this one and go up a man I maybe you have to do more than one square up for a portion of a yard so in this case you go up like this over and down and then this would be 10 by 10 by 30 for this portion of the yard and then over here you would go okay this portion would be 30 by 30 so now you've taken this odd shaped yard and you've broken it down into manageable pieces that you can measure it don't care what shape you got I don't care what shape you got imagine it in boxes that's what you have to do and it doesn't have to be perfectly Square let's go through the formula for these so in this case we have three sections we have to calculate we got to go 40 by 10 and then we have to go third okay so we broke it into three sections three quadrants the first quadrant is 40 by 10 the second quadrant is 30 by 10 so we just multiply 30 * 10 and the third quadrant is 30 by 30 so we have three separate quadrants we're going to add those together so we have 400 + 300 is 700 + 900 gives us a grand spanking total of 1,600 squ fet square feet don't do us a lot of good we're going to convert that to square yards so we simply just take that number and divide by nine and when we divide by nine that gives us the quantity of sod in that yard let's just do that right now 1,600 divide by 9 177 square yards of side this works on a circle this works on any shape if you have a circle just make a box out of it the corners stick out a little bit who cares don't worry about it it's flipping s okay you take a little bit extra home with you you throw it in a ditch somewhere that somebody that wants green grass in their ditch um you get you're a little long you're a little short it doesn't make a bit of difference okay wait let me back that up you don't want to be short the worst thing you can possibly do is try to go pick up five pieces is a side so make sure you're always a little bit long um you know how to measure it now but how do you estimate it well this is the first step to estimating estimating accurately one thing that I want you to do is then you go through and you take calculate the cost of your saw how much does it actually cost you to buy a square yard of saw at your dealer uh around here I think right now it's a150 per square yard so you know that that is the cost of your material okay so here's something we have to calculate we have let's go through the breakdown of how much this side is going to cost you to install the side cost you $1.50 per square yard and we want to figure out how much per square yard it actually costs you the owner to be installing this side but now you've got to remember it costs you something to get the side there if you have to have 177 you have to install 177 Square square yards of sod well guess what that's quite a few pallet that's um 177 / 3 or divided by 75 should be about three I'm sorry 2.36 pallets of sod maybe you don't have a truck big enough to do it you got to have a semi bring it out to you if they're going to charge you in this case $200 to install that s okay what you're going to figure into your formula let's say they charge you literally $200 just to bring it out the semi you take 177 id200 that's going to give you 88 cents per square yard did I do that right I don't think I did that right hold on you take $200 and divide by how many square yard iide I apologize that cost you $112 per square yard so your initial your purchase price is $1.50 a150 it costs you a112 to have it delivered you add those two numbers up a bck 50 $262 is your expense is your expense right now per square yard okay are you still with me the final component component is actually installing the side and you've got to figure out how many square yard can I install per hour and if it cost me $20 per hour and I can install let's use a realistic production rate a labor rate how many square yards do you think one of your guys can inst no I don't know what you guys think but I figure that one of my guys by himself can put 50 square yards in on this very specific job we have 177 square yards so we take 17 77 and then we divide it by 50 because that's how many square yard per hour this guy can put in that comes up to 3.54 hours so all that sod in this yard should be installed by one guy in 3.54 hours how much do you pay him an hour let's just say it's $20 an hour so we multiply 3.54 by 20 and that means it's going to cost us $70 to install that that side okay so now we have to convert that divide the 70 by 177 40 cents per square yard is what it's costing us so total total expense should be $32 that's your expense did you follow me we have the sad price here we have we CED out the transportation fee which came out to $150 a yard um and then we've also counted in all the other in line item all the other expenses to come up with the actual number that we need to know what it's costing us and now are you going to do this job at Cost you're the owner put some profit in there put 10% on top of it if you put 10% on this number you just simply add another 30 cents onto it so $332 a square yard it's going to vary don't go by these formulas try it and true use the idea of how to break it down and apply it to your area if you're in California what you're going to be doing for side jobs is not going to be the same so this is how I do my side jobs and you can just use this as an example for your own projects I have between one and two guys that lay the field that means they just they're just focusing on sticking sod in this general area and then I have one guy what I call a dedicated cutter and this guy is trimming up all the corners cuz you can see this is a irregular shape we're not actually putting the saw in and then the square we're putting the sod to this semi weird circle thing right here right well this has to all be cut every piece of s has to be cut and it takes almost as much time as it takes to lay out the side so the fastest way to do it is to get the field started and then to have a person start cutting the corners so that it's all cut in by the time that the field is all done and everybody can leave at the same time you don't want a bottleneck tools how do you grade let's get into that a little bit um a lot of the times I just use a skid steer with tracks okay maybe you don't have a skid steer with tracks don't worry about that rubber tired skid steer works as well and if you don't have that don't worry about it okay I did the one of the biggest grading jobs I ever did was for the Shaka women's prison here in Minnesota and it was acres and Acres I had to grade and I grabbed a four-wheeler and I grabbed a piece of chain length fence was actually the gate out of a chain length fence cuz it had the frame around it then I threw a couple cement blocks on the top and I cruised around all day long just driving back and forth Works phenomenally but let's say you don't have an area that big what else can you use you can use a hard rake the very first thing I I say is use a hard rake but then follow it up with a spring rake an actual leaf rake just like the big old plastic Leaf rakes that you probably have lying around you can buy them for three bucks down at Menard's Home Depot Lowe's your local place I don't care where you get it don't spend a lot of money on it that spring rake it's the same as a chain link fence it's the same as a grading bar phenomenal I would have never realized it if my lazy truck driver hadn't so let's clarify what I mean by lazy truck driver lazy truck driver means he was in search of a better way plain and simple and that's how you refine the installation techniques on your in in every project that you do so we've covered estimating we've covered calculating the size we went over a few tips and tricks on how to install it next comes your questions whatever you need to know you can email me at Stan landscape buspro decom but I'm going to ask a favor from you if you've enjoyed this video please share it please put post it up on the forums whatever help spread the word the more people that know this stuff gets us all on the same page and what happens is when we're all on the same page our numbers aren't coming in and out up and down we can all start to make a profit we can all grow together I love you guys I hope this has helped now go out and get