I Tried To Install Artificial Turf With No Experience

Look, this did not turn out as I had expected and um I'm sorry for that. In the past we've built walkways using pavers. We then built walkways using pressure treated lumber and gravel. Well, today we're on mission to create a beautiful walkway using artificial turf. Oh, and did I mention I have zero experience working with turf? How hard could it be? Let's get into it. All right, so let's talk about what the game plan here. So, this is our little health oasis, right? We got a little hot tub here. We have our cold plunge that I built last summer. Then last fall I built a sauna. And it's awesome except for getting in and out. This used to be a sandbox before the hot tub came in. So, that's why the sand's there. And once you get here, I kind of started working with this little walkway, but it sucks. It's cold. It's uninviting, which I know you're like "What are you a designer now?" I'm just mimicking what I was saying. But also, it gets on your feet and the rocks go into the cold plunge. It goes in the sauna. It's a mess. So, what we're going to do is create a nice beautiful clean walkway that you can walk with bare feet. That's why we're using turf. And it's going to look so much better and put together. So, the first thing we're going to need to do is get ourselves a base layer making sure that this is not a muddy mess. So, we'll dig down 3 to 4 in and then we'll put some paver base or actually even better road mix. That will have a nice solid foundation and we'll go from there. And the cool thing is this is totally a solution you guys can do at your house. You know, behind the house, anywhere you're walking and you want something low maintenance, I think artificial turf might be the way to go. It's a nice looking wheelbarrow. Oh, it's brand new, dude. I still have the sticker on it. Look at that. I know this is kind of a dad thing, but I actually got excited. I wanted like the two wheel up front for stability. Sometimes you got to shoot yourself at this old age. The good news is it digs pretty easily. Bad news is there's a lot of sand. That's why it digs really easily. You know, people ask me all the time. They'll send me messages and be like, "Hey, what safety glasses are you using? Or what's what's the work pants you're using? Or freaking what rake are you using?" And I can't get to all of those messages, but if you really want to get a hold of me, join Builder's Lodge. Oh, look, we even have merch. And I'm the founding member. It's a private community. It's exclusive for the people who watch this channel, and you'll see behind the scenes there. You see extra bonus content. Give you guys workshops, tutorials, and I even consult you on projects you might be working on. Not to mention our happy hour live streams, everything. Go check it out. There's a QR code, scan it. I'll see you there. The stump. It's in our way. This day is getting worse and worse. We're going to have to dig this around. I'm going to have to trim it up as deep as I can. Cuz if that's there, that thing's going to be leveled. That's going to be a tripping hazard. So, that means my day just got worse. What does Jocko Willink say? Good. Day got worse? Good. Stump in the way? Good. Okay, hear me out. I'm not proud of the choices I'll be making today. And cast judgment all you want, but this is my burden to bear. I could go and rent a stump grinder, but I'm too lazy and it'll make a huge mess around here. I could use a chainsaw, but the chainsaw is going to get beat up. The chain is going to get thrown away cuz it's going to be probably beyond repair. So, we're going to use a recip saw with what I think is a pruning blade, but I'm not sure. Pretty confident it's just a regular wood blade. Let's see what we can come up with. Well, one of my New Year's resolutions was to take care of my body. And the way I'm going to do that is by using the right tool for the right job so my body can handle doing builds like that well into my old age. Here's the kicker. This is going to be some shady and I'm all for it. And let me explain to you why. These are I want to say titanium. Hell, they could be vibranium from Wakanda. I don't know. Teeth. And these spin. Well, if one of these rocks gets caught in it at the right angle, it will launch at here, here, or here. And all of these are tempered windows, which means or glass, which means even the smallest rock hit will make everything shatter. But, I think we can be prepared as much as we can be. So, to mitigate any kind of damage, I got a piece of plywood that will just sit right there. Also, this will keep all the dust and sawdust and chips from flying and getting into the dirty. So, I think if I position this at the right angle, anything that goes underneath will get stopped by the machine. As long as I don't move this arm left to right too much, we'll avoid from cracking that. And this is taken care of. So, now let's just make sure we don't damage this machine by hitting any of these rocks. I should have done like a new introduction for this. I'd be like, "We have a 1,000-lb machine, spinning blade, and an entire wall surrounded with glass. Welcome to Jackass. I think I should get some safety glasses before I catch a tree trunk to my eyelid. Let's slice and dice, baby. In the words of the late great Colonel Sanders, I'm too drunk to taste this chicken. We bought our time back, baby. I love this. All right, let me clean all this up. I got to take this machine back, move all this, dig more of it out, and then tomorrow we'll be ready for road mix. All right, big day today. Back is tight from yesterday shoveling. Today we got our road mix ready. Couple of things to start the day off. Bought a brand new flathead uh shovel uh cuz I can't find my other one. And uh I lost my AirPods, so I'm rocking my over-the-ear headphones. So, off to a great start so far. Let's start lugging this stuff around and not pull our back. I'm all over the place. I decided to give myself a a family vacation for spring break. I come back from it and everything's in shambles. Can't find things, things are broken, and things are lost. I got to stop relaxing and just keep working. This PJ dump trailer has been one of the best things I've ever purchased. It just helps transport stuff and move either blocks or retaining wall, dirt, road mix, you name it. It's It's really a workhorse. We're going to have to raise this thing and dump it. However, it's not connected to my truck and if I'm I've never done this before when it's not connected to the truck. So, there's a part of me thinks that's going to just tip over. I'm going to just kind of watch it. I don't know. It's It might be the dumbest thing I've ever done, but it also will be for the sake of science. We're going to learn if we can use a dump trailer to dump a load while it's not connected to a truck. If it starts tipping back just a little bit, I'm going to stop and then reconnect my truck to it, but part of me thinks it might work. All right, this is where it might spring up. It started moving forward. Towards my truck here. I mean, it is spring up, which is great. And I know this might be the dumbest thing I've ever done, but I just wanted to see for myself. I've never seen this been done that fast. Good news is nobody got hurt. Nothing broke. What a great Friday. My back is so tight. Like right there. Just tight as a knot. Yeah. You don't care. Okay. Well, that's fine. Just wanted to share how I'm feeling. >> All right, couple more wheelbarrows and I think we should be good. Hopefully we have enough stuff. We definitely don't have enough material. All right, so based off my Google search they said 4 in of road mix, but technically they said you got to use quarter What is it called? Quarter minus. So, I didn't know what that was and I Googled it and quarter minus is essentially my understanding aggregate that's like quarter inches in size and then sand goes down to like almost like paver sand, right? It compresses really well. Here's the only problem. It's dependent on where you live, location. So, the local local rock mill that everybody uses for construction here does not carry it. So, I had to go with traditional road mix which is going to be fine. I'm going to spread this around and hopefully we can compact it, slap that snot out of it. We'll do two sides of grading. Rough grading to make sure it slopes. I believe it's like 1 or 2 in per every 5 ft I believe from the house and then we'll do a finish grade where everything looks nice and flat. >> All right. We definitely don't have enough material. What else is new, right? Damn it. Okay, got to go get another load. All right, one more load, we should be good. It's getting harder and harder to get the wheelbarrow through, so figured we start compacting it. Pick this up from Tate's the same time I picked up the stump grinder. Figured it's safe to kill two birds with one stone. I'm going to start whack-packing this thing down. At that point, it'll give me a true rough idea of where are my low spots, where do we need to add and keep our slope going to keep ourselves out of trouble. >> Using the rough side of the landscaping rake to break up any loose stuff, right? And then they'll flip it over and use the smooth side to fill in the low spots that we just aggregated from the top and to bring to the low spot. And you know what? Here's what I'll tell you. This is such a low stress thing so far cuz it's not like pavers. With pavers you got to make sure you got to put pipes down, float the thing, make sure that everything's in the same plane. But this is like what grass would grow on. If like the old saying goes, if it looks straight, it's probably straight. I I think I just came up with an invention. But you heard it here first. This landscaping rake, they need to have a giant bubble, like a level. Cuz that way you could just eyeball it and make sure it's nice and straight and you don't have to carry a level with you. And you can either keep it this length or maybe a little bit longer. Dude, I bet all the landscaping guys that would love that. That would save so much time. And precision. Going to smooth it out a few more times, hit it with a plate, and then we're going to hit it with some water so it settles. We're going to do that a few more times. This sucker is going to get settled down. All right, let's do the finishing grade here. So, when we put this down here, this is a nice little straight edge. High spot, low spot. So, if we roughen lightly the high spots, we can blend it over the low spot. There you go. And then we'll whack back it again and so on and so forth. You know what's working really well that I'm just noticing this? And this is one of those on-the-job training situation, is when you do find out a high spot and you do establish your low spot, go at a like you're doing X around it to fill in that low spot. I remember this trick when I used to like do a little bit of body work on cars, like literally amateur stuff, DIY stuff. I remember learning that when you sand a dent in a car, you don't just sand this way, you got to do crosses so it just kind of blends both planes together. And this trick is legitimately working. When you join the Builder's Lodge community, these are the questions that we answer over there. So if you're like, "Oh, what did you do on this? Remind me." I can consult you on your project. That's what the community's for, for you guys. I'm going to hit it one more time and then hit it with some water. We got ourselves a solid foundation. This thing is solid as a rock, which is awesome. Now, before we start getting too ahead of ourselves, we need to create a little garden bed area here. This We need to It's If it's a walkway, we need to have it look beautiful. So, I just picked up some really cool pavers that we're going to make a little border around here just to kind of tie everything off and I think you're going to like it. Check this out. All right, I found these like small flagstone pavers and they're tiny. These are like 8 in wide and they're not too tall. So, originally I was thinking of just doing one layer, but we might be able to get away with two and I love the concrete look, but I'm going to make it even more contrasted, more like visually like saturated in color and protect the swag zone. And I'll show you how we're going to do it in a second. I don't want to disrupt this road mix by hammering stakes and hanging a string line. So, I think I'm just going to use, you know, piece of trim board and just kind of keep the same distance from the wall or the building to make sure this thing is straight as possible. Dog on dang it. Straight as hell, Bobby. All right, two more. Oh, that's cool. It's It's empty. So, there's no two more. It's Alex is completely par for the course, short three blocks. Cool, but we're not stopping. We're trucking. I'm going to go pick up couple more blocks to finish this off as well as a load of pea gravel, so this garden bed area will be ready. If I had a green thumb, I'd be so proud of myself. I'd have pickles and cucumbers and tomatoes. I That's basically the amount of vegetables that I know. But, let me dose this off with more pea gravel. Probably bring it up to about the first brick. And then, we'll lock it down with the mulch glue. All right. So, here is the turf that we're working with. I didn't have to go buy any of it yet because this was left over by the previous homeowner in the garage. It looks like it was left over from the work that wasn't finished here. And it's great because we can apply it here. I did a little rough eyeball on it to see, you know, do we have enough material? It I mean, in patches, yes. Sorry, just kicked up some dirt. Something's Where was he? Oh, yeah, that's right. Turf. Um So, hopefully we have enough of it. Yeah, we don't have enough. I also looked online to see in case I need to buy something that matches it. Home Depot, Lowe's, they don't carry it. And then, I tracked this stuff down at Costco. But, you have to order it online. So, if you want to like get the stuff, it's kind of cool. Costco. Go there. But, let's see if we could uh puzzle piece this thing out. So, this is my longest piece. That's a good run here. However, this is still super short. I could possibly move these blocks out and be able to actually use this or else I would have to literally chop it this way and rotate them completely across which that would be the stupidest thing to do. And we're kind of known for that sometimes. I got everything adjusted. This should work. I don't know what I'm going to do with that weird cut there. Pick myself up a carpet stretcher. Never used one a day in my life, but what I'm going to do is instead of using stakes, I saw these guys installing these turf with uh hot dipped exterior nails, 4-in nails. And uh what they would do is they would secure one corner and then carpet stretch that sucker out. Like right now, you see all these grass blades are being pushed down. They're all going weird places. So, and there's a bunch of wrinkles. So, hopefully we'll be able to stretch it out. And the reason I'm not using staples that you would use like with fabric on the ground, the weed barrier is uh staples you'll be able to actually possibly, I don't know yet, but I think you would be able to see them um as they're pushing the blades of grass together, you know, compressing them. That's my weird logic. Do what you want with it. I got to stretch this carpet. >> I don't know why, but these look like two different colors. Like this looks more like fake green and this looks more of like a real well-nourished lawn green. Um I don't know. We'll see. Once everything gets power broomed and all the bristles get wrist wrist risen uh and infill goes on hopefully that's not the case, but this is not liking this. All right, so cutting this thing is an absolute pain in the but there is some kind of tips I'll mention that work better. It's easier to cut from the back than it is from the front. That's one thing. So don't try to jam your utility knife from here and trace it out. It just it's way harder. It makes sense, but it's way harder. Uh and then on top of it is like these are rocks, right? They're weird kind of shape. So I'll just kind of make my line like this like a stylus and then I'll try to carefully keep it in place and hopefully I didn't screw up or cut my hands off. And uh let's see here. Should work well. I think I need to replace my blade. Come on. Perfect. Well perfectly adjacent. It's possible. All right, progress update. I'm not liking this and this is absolute y'all. I thought I'm going to have maybe a few seams and that's it. This looks like a hodgepodge. It looks like a Frankenstein. You know how his face has all these stickings put together? This is what this turf looks. Now, I'm a little bit optimistic. I'm hopeful cuz I have a solution that might work. And that is when I get to the point that I'm using the infill, I'm going to use a power broom to raise all these bristles up, right? All these little turf uh grass follicles, if you will. Put the feed in or the infill and hopefully they'll keep them standing up and that will allow for these transitions to be a little bit more if you can imagine it being fluffy, a little bit more camouflaged, if you will. Also, I really thought I was going to have extra room here, but I don't have any more material left. And if I order another roll of this stuff from Costco, it's not going to show up for another week or two. So, I think what I'm going to do is grab more of those pavers, block this off, put decorative rock there. I'm still going to have my cold plunge here. I'm going to still going to have an epic thing here, but I it's just sometimes you do what you can to plan, but it happens and uh I'm okay with that cuz I saved a bunch of money by doing it myself. So, I couldn't sleep last night thinking about these seams and the fact of how many we have, but also the right way of installing it. A lot of YouTube channels I watched of professional turf installers, what they're doing is exactly what we did. Nails, maybe even staplers, put it together, some kind of maybe they'll make a unique cutting pattern. And then I went to Home Depot and looked at their turf aisle and turns out there's a product for seams and it's essentially a seam tape and artificial turf seam glue. So, this stuff exists. I don't know which way is the right way, but because I have a Frankenstein looking patch here, I'm going to try to reinforce that as much as I can. And then on top of it, I got staples, too. The nails were great, but we won't really know how well they worked until the the grass blades are sitting upright. So, we're all just going to learn and experiment here together at the same time. How about that, huh? So, here's what we got going on today. This is called a power broom. It's literally a weed whacker engine powered to a broom. And then this is artificial turf infill. We got to look up what are the benefits for that. Uh it adds weight to keep the turf down, which is good, doesn't fly off when it's windy. Uh keeping the blades of the grass standing upright, preventing matting. That's what we're trying to accomplish. And protecting the backing of it from the sun and foot traffic damage. Makes a whole lot of sense. It said 1 to 2 lb per square foot. I got a drop spreader, but first I'm going to try to move some of this rocks out of here, raise some of these blades of grass, and then we'll try to spread the stuff. I also hope this thing doesn't just rip off the turf right off the grass, cuz that's going to be no bueno. I'm not completely sure I know how to use this. This is really hard. You have to push past it. Which is easy to do it on the concrete. It's really hard to do it when it catches the blades. Woo. I learned that if you flip it over, it's a lot easier. That way when you pull, you don't have to…