Site Assessment and Planning

This is another phase of the project. We said we were going to do this landscaping in phases. How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? And so Frankie is working on wrapping up the deck. So he's going to be building on the staircase on the railing. I'll help him with that. I'll jump off. But while he's doing that, I'm going to come over here and start prepping for the sauna. Now, in this case, the sauna's going to go here. It's got to go outside the drip line of this tree because it's a wood burning sauna. We don't want the exhaust going up underneath the tree cuz we don't want the sparks going into the dry leaves. Okay, this makes the most logical sense for the area except for the topography. The terrain is not going to allow us to set a sauna in place unless we want a sauna that's kittywampus. And unless we want to sit kittywampus, we've got to level that ground out. To level that ground out means we've either got to dig it down to its natural elevation or we got to raise it up. Now, in this case, we have a decision to make, and that's to look at the drainage pattern. This right here is the low point. So, as a landscaper, when I'm designing, I don't want to stick one of the main features in the low point where it's going to run into water problems. So, taking that into consideration, that means I need to raise the sauna elevation up, which is going to give me a little bit of a challenge because if I raise this elevation up, it doesn't match with any of the other elevations. And in fact, it would start to flood out the house. So, we've got these interesting challenges that we need to work into. So, all we're going to do right now is focus and concentrate on just raising up the spot for the sauna and leveling that out. And then in the previous video where we were talking about building the deck, we're going to see how that looks. And then we're going to decide how we want to build up to it. So, we got a pretty full day. We're going to be using the cast loader. We're going to be using an excavator. We're going to be using boulders. We're going to make this not an overly complicated project because sometimes less is more. And uh let's just get this uh let's just get this show started. All right. The plan is to