It was a BAD TIME for this building inspector to show up.

[Music] yeah our footing inspection and geogrid inspection's coming in the morning so it would sure be nice to keep being able to move and not have to fix stuff [Applause] that's good if you can clear the tree up there try it right there see if you can clear the [Applause] tree in the twin cities metropolitan area we're not allowed to store our materials on the street we used to but we've been fined we've been brought into court we've been given tickets and so we know now that we just have to use the if we're working on somebody's property we have to use their space to accomplish their job we can't use public space all right drop her down i think you got it drop her down there you go got a rock here brought our equipment in here's our access this job's going to go through a whole lot of changes from the point we're going to look at it now to the point where it ends simply because we found that the house we're working on didn't have adequate frost protection to build what we initially wanted to do and we couldn't just jeopardize this structure so we had to modify our plants here's the old timber wall this thing's not looking so good anymore so we're replacing it with uh versa lock standards charcoal blend we're gonna do one single wall instead of two walls and uh and this wall over here is getting replaced just a little one i don't think we'll be able to save this tree though it's a little bit too close to the wall there's the basement let's see this basement and then the sun porch well if those are frost footings and we take this wall away the sun porch is going to sink and you can't uh can't repack that underneath there so we had goliath tech come out and check to uh put some helical piers in if needed but they found that the footing goes down quite a bit deeper than we all thought for this sun porch which is good news meaning they don't have to do helicopters so we'll see we're going to excavate slowly and make sure make sure they got footing where it's needed as we go down and um go from there hopefully all goes well find out soon enough so now one of the things tim said that i want to back it up and make sure we're on the same page as we're building one wall instead of two on a lot of job sites we opt to go with a singular wall instead of a terrace wall and a lot of times you'll have a contractor come into a job site and suggest a terrorist wall so they can get away from engineering and they can get away from permit requirements but on most sites structurally you can't get away from building a terrorist wall without one wall impacting the other wall and in those cases it's just best to build a single wall but on this very particular instance it's not possible because of the lack of frost protection and we have to take that into account as we're building up this wall but we don't discover this fact until after we've been able to actually dig into the site and expose the soils and look exactly what we have hidden buried below our work zone [Music] [Applause] so this is the technique that we use when we're just digging dirt and what tim's doing right here is he's actually separating the organic material from the structural fill we don't want to put this material back into the structural zone so he'll very carefully scrape this off and separate it just showing these guys how you like to ruin stuff here yeah it's great just when you want to get going got got an inspection in the morning and you got to get some base in today and yeah our footing inspection and geogrid inspections coming in the morning so it would sure be nice just to keep being able to move and not have to fix stuff but it seems to be the way things go all right back at it had a hose blow on the uh daewoo here just went and got a new one made up put back together so we can keep digging it's always something i'm gonna cross-thread it alex i'm trying to find the notch here there she goes so the guys have to get this all dug down exposed the trench dug the footing put in place and the first layers of block installed compacted and geogrid laid down before the inspector comes which is happening right away in the morning and the hose blowing wasn't the end of the world but it was a loss of at least three hours of time for this day woo that we just didn't have anticipated into the schedule i know some of you guys right now are saying we'll just reschedule the building inspector well in our neck of the woods to reschedule building inspector means you can only call between the hours of 8 and 8 30. that's when they're in there typically in their office and if you don't if you call outside of those hours you have to leave a message hope they call you back and then you have to schedule it for another day but work is not allowed to go on until the inspector has come out and verified that he's good with everything the way it is so it's very critical to catch that building inspector and to get that done so the rest of the products progress on the job can keep moving forward so we're digging this out for grid we know we're seven feet wide at the top for grid and uh as we're digging this out we're just doing it in in layers [Applause] um and we're also trying to find to make sure there's no frost boatings that we're gonna run into so should be by all rights four feet down from this sun porch here should be the frost footings but we're not finding any which is great for us because we got to oversize our dig for the the wall but as we dig down we got to keep checking just to make sure because you can't undermine the footings so what tim is talking about is if you see how this house steps up the footings typically will step up like that and if we have a footing up here and the base of our wall needs to be down here we can undermine the wall or we can undermine the footing so we've got to be very conscious of where the footing is at all times all right um we excavated our wall out sounds good and um found right here this uh in minnesota here you gotta have frost protection so this is a walk-out basement and the footing goes all the way down here but then steps up right there which means that's right at the ground level so if we were to put our wall where we want to put our wall by backing it up that doesn't give it enough frost protection here so change of plans we have to go back out out into here with our with a with a two-tier wall system in this section just to protect that frost footing all right the block has arrived frost this is going to be a seven foot tall wall so we would have plenty of frost protection we only need four feet but we need frost protection both vertically and horizontally and if we put the wall here and the frost footing is over here and it's not with it's it's too close within that four foot zone we're not going to get frost protection sideways so when we're building a wall we're taking into consideration not just horizontal frost protection or up and down like from the top down but also from the side as well and so to build this wall and to do it right everything has to get moved out [Music] oh don't tip it off ah figure get you on camera make you a little nervous huh if i shut if i shut the camera off is that going to work better yeah it's quite flocking me yeah god we love teasing each other in our company and we've actually toned it down a lot when tim and i first started and we didn't know better we were just two young bucks out building stuff we would make the new guys cry that was part of the initiation process if we couldn't get a new guy to cry like tears we didn't feel like we succeeded and we quickly learned that maybe not the most appropriate thing to do but we sure did have fun learning that that wasn't right alex loves the camera so this is what you're seeing here is what we have to get ready before the inspector can go and if we don't have this done we're not allowed to build up outward we're not allowed to do anything [Music] the weather people are saying that uh supposed to rain heavy this weekend so hope they're right nothing like prepping for rain that doesn't come but at least it's prepped and we get back to work right away on monday so all righty well we actually got a little rain here last night that's uh been a while since we had rain and uh kind of protected what we could out here so we didn't get too waterlogged planning on this being our planter box area it's curving in towards alex there or not curving but a corner and then the wall is going to go this way and then up here our wall is going up to the house we're going to step down this hill and we got another little part up here a corner coming off to give her a room for a future patio customers will get bids from landscaping companies where they tear us a wall so they build shorter walls right next to each other with the idea in mind that they won't need the geo grid they won't need the engineering but where they're wrong in those cases is what happens is the upper wall this is a lower wall and this is an upper wall this upper wall if it's not twice the height of the lower wall so this lower wall is four foot this upper wall has to be eight foot back if it's any if it's anywhere within that eight foot zone it's placing what's called a surcharge on this lower wall and you can get this lower wall blowing out so that's where all this geo geogrid solves all those problems [Music] this is where we're at right now with things and right here this portion of the wall is gonna step up or this is where this is where the uh planter bed starts right here we're gonna go straight up to the house with another wall and it'll be up that tall four probably got five pieces of bread they're just figuring out the grid levels for this portion [Music] um [Music] oh [Music] bye [Music] um [Music] so [Music] all right what i was saying is if you drive around and you take a look at retaining walls right where they're joined together typically you'll see settlement and the reason you see that settlement is because this is a really tricky spot to get accurate compaction or adequate compaction and a lot of times contractors just miss it and so right where two retaining walls go together that's why you get that area settlement that's why it's tricky to join two walls together and if we build a terraced wall we always prefer to try to leave them completely separate one from the other whenever possible but to us the best thing you can ever do is just build a single retaining wall get it engineered put the geo grid in get your inspections done have your engineer come out and sign off on it bring in all of the best materials you possibly can and you're probably not going to have any issues and that's our video for today hope you guys enjoyed this one a ton is coming down the pipeline tomorrow i go out and shoot a video on the mammoth that's a new piece of uh snow plowing gear right now we've got ah we we got just so much so much cool stuff going on i don't even know where to begin plow um yesterday i think i spent the day oh yeah yesterday i put on a brand new snowplow on the front of a pickup truck and sam is actually here right now we're gonna go out and give that one a test so we got a ton of stuff coming down the pipeline and i hope you enjoy these projects um and we enjoy sharing the the process with you and trying to share some of the the thoughts that go along with what we do and why we do it and hope you guys enjoy all of it the thumbs up goes a long way and that's all we got for you today god bless go get em you guys see on the next one