Assess Existing Hillside and Define Project Scope

Hello everybody. So today what we're going to be talking about is how to turn a hillside into a usable backyard. What I when I got the call on this project, what we initially seen when I came out was a steep slope that ran directly into the back of this customer's house. It led to multiple issues. The first one was drainage. Everything on the site drained right down into their basement, which created floods during heavy rains. The second one is there was just plain and simply no room to use the yard for anything other than a sledding hill, which led directly into their kitchen. They wanted a flat enough space that they could have their kids play in the backyard. They could throw a grill out there and do some cooking, and if they wanted to toss a ball around, they wanted to have enough room to be able to do that. But they also had a budget. So, the solution that we came up with was what what I'm going to do is chunk it into three separate parts. The first part is excavation, which is what you see behind me right now. What we're doing is the excavation part, the second part is slope stabilization. So although we're flat, creating a flat space, we're also creating more aggressive slopes on the site that somehow need to be stabilized. And then the third phase of this project is the restoration phase. So when we break a project like this down into its three separate components and we have a budget that we have to fit it within, what we like to do is try to create as much flat space within the excavation number and minimalize how much slope stabilization or what we're going to call it for what it really is retaining walls and settings. The reason we want to minimize that is because that is the most expensive portion of most landscaping projects. When you call in an excavation company that can build retaining walls, it's simple for them to do the excavation. The material cost on a boulder retaining wall is where the expense starts to rise. So, in this case, as we look behind us, we're right now in the excavation phase of it. We've currently hauled out hundreds and hundreds of cubic yards of soil and have just begun forming or terraforming the slopes and stabilizing them. What we're concentrating on in this case is minimalizing those retaining walls. What we're doing in this particular job is a three tiered retaining wall, but we're going to quickly break those three tiered retaining walls down into boulder settings. And the reason we go down to boulder settings…