Rebuilding a Front Yard with a total new landscape! A Simple & Cheap Design

so here's the next portion we're gonna rip out this front yard and we're going to try to match what we did on the retaining wall next to it to complete the landscaping other's loans you see this salt degradation right here that is something that is so common alongside driveways the CMU concrete masonry unit blocks they're done they really just are not designed to have salt or corrosive material alongside of them so we're gonna solve that by using boulders we'll see how this one turns out when it comes to landscaping a front yard there's a lot of things that you can do but sometimes the most important thing I think gets overlooked and that's the customers budget and creating something that they're happy with without forcing them to feel uncomfortable about their finances I see a lot of people that are willing to compromise their own financial security and take out a loan or overextend themselves just a little too far because they get this emotional surge of something that they really want to have that emotional surge can be pretty dangerous a lot of times I like to try to reel my customers back we can create something pretty neat without busting the budget without going to the bank and trying to secure a loan to do it and so a lot of times I tell the customers let's establish a budget number that you're comfortable with and then let's come up with a few different options and see which one maybe will fit and then if there's nothing that really makes you happy well then let's look at other options after that so the original scope of this job was the customer had a failing retaining wall that was holding up their driveway and the salt degradation had gotten to it and much destroyed it we ended up building a boulder retaining wall along the side of the driveway and they wanted something in the front of the house just to help blend things together but they didn't have a big budget to do it and so another option that we look at is we can always split the work up in twos yearly sections we can do one portion of a job one year and then another portion another year and a third portion another year we've done projects over the course of seven years because it was just easier on the customer to financially delegate or set up their budget that way now in this case we're doing this front yard we did the side retaining wall but there's more work to do around this house but that'll be down the road the level of the top like you got a little drip on that gravel sweat equity another part another thing that we try to work with our customers is to do the hard parts of the job that they really can't do like moving these boulders in place would be pretty tough for these guys but they can plant it they can mulch it they can do a lot of things so I'd like to ask the customer what kind of things that they enjoy doing and then leave those things out of the job and let them participate in the creation of their own project when they start to invest a little bit of their own time energy and effort into it it really makes it more personal for them so a little bolder setting job like this doesn't cost much it doesn't take a lot of time to do but we work with a customer at work up that where you gonna start fading it out okay we're gonna Carol this wall away from the sidewalk instead of follow the sidewalk [Music] make sense [Music] so he's got he picked out his character boulders and he's already got those fat right so that's called a character stone and what we'll do is try to pick out one or two stones that just aren't have visual interest and then place them in a way that Orient's them so that they're dominant in the landscaping feature and then also kind of think ahead where the plantings will go so if we're not doing the plantings we'll work with the customer to devise a planting plan so we know what they're going to do next and let them know what we've done and how they can blend the two things together you know how they can use their planting stuff optimize and beautify the stones and the characteristics of the stone because there's a lot of little details like that that in the end make it pop and what you're gonna see is Tim is going to move this character stone a couple different times before he's really satisfied with how that one goes in place so what you're gonna see next is both Tim and Sam are going to step back into the position where they think the optimal viewing angle is where people will most likely look at it from to see how it looks from that point I like to stand back a little bit and they both want to look at their work to see what they got at week okay you like that little one on top there little tiny like no baby pebble on there okay just trying to incorporate he's gonna put mulch or whatever in here and plantings but a double shredded hardwood mulch natural color or colored I don't want to use that cool one with the lines in it up next to the tree and then there's a big one looks awesome yeah those are two nice ones looks like you got this one set aside - is this a character Boulder [Music] so as we're looking at this thing and you walk up your first impression you need to look at it from this point and also down there that's where you position the rocks that rocks got a lot of really cool lines in it yeah yeah I was just gonna say that whole rock needs to be quite fun if that flat plains side yep you know you don't want to see this side cuz that's there's nothing there the Tim is actually looking at the the high spot or the highest point of the or the best-looking point of this stone spin that out towards the sidewalk so from this point we we're seeing too much of that flat side but from the road let's go down and take a look at it down here and see what it looks like so we bring in a few extra boulders that way he's got a choice to you know a selection and there's nothing we can see from down here except for all this but then we'll Holly's away but that way he's got the best of the best okay so from this point actually we were gonna look at it like this yeah it's off that one so if you're gonna run a single row into that one boy you're really making that kind of look like a boulder wall then where's his downspout go through buried drain boxes I bet we've done them before where they we poured it under the sidewalk and yeah and it works out great for them and then I've had other customers say that it freezes in the winter run along yeah but he's got aggressive enough pitch that it shouldn't he should be good okay well what I would say the I mean if this was my I would bury it go underneath this sidewalk go into the middle of the yard pop it up water is lawn every time it rains that one's not going to freeze I already tell them that all right see this what happened see what happens when I'm late to the party all right well let's see what we'll come back to this and see what decisions Tim makes in just a moment so he uses the totem to level out a spot definitely all right I think that's it kissing goodnight there we go now we got the lines to match so they visually look good to the eye Sam a backfill it and I want to walk around and show you guys what I mean but the lines look good so you guys can see those lines they're not going all over the place we're not sideways crooked so the lines although they may not look completely natural and I'm err quoting they also visually look appealing to the eye it's the easiest way for the eye to look at those lines you got to take into consideration as well that's perfect ads the spot that's the sweet spot right there now bet you Tim will still mess with it like five more times before he's done and that little boulder is that go there his place there in case we needed it for to prop up the bigger stones there is no reason to mess with that Boulder he's got a mass doesn't he I told you Tim's always got a mess what was wrong with that song Sam that one he's on right now I don't know either he wants it bedded down more okay that makes sense so I'm gonna yeah he wants this one this big one bedded down to the soil a little more so it kind of looks like it's uh the the earth is exposed and like how you get this little it's hidden treasure it's kind of fun to try to figure out ways as I haven't talked all right yeah he's just gonna fed that Boulder down so right now he's just prepping the spot for it solty so setting these stones is actually the fun part of our job because it's just artistic expression freedom it's just like hey how do these look and you get to play with them and you get to move them around and set them in place if you don't like them you can switch them around it's actually a lot of fun creating that alright he's got his little spot dug out now he's gonna flip her down into suck that bad boy in and then Sam will cover it up he look somewhat covered up with them but get it covered up so that it's kind of filled up anything in between them boulders just let just leave that as a green space right there [Music] little green space goes a long way sometimes sometimes negative space is better than filling it up with rocks not sometimes what happens I've seen a lot of contractors do is just Boulder Boulder Boulder rock rock rock like the ring of pearls but with rocks leaves his faces it gives it gives you a spot to plant your spot to view a highlight a bush or something you like luckily we can always undo it [Music] see how that looks it's a nice fit but it takes away from the character Stalin it's a nice bit but it takes away from your character stone you see it I'm saying because now you're graduating up in size right if you left that as negative space and just tapered it down they could put a bush there or something and then all of a sudden you've made given more emphasis to your character stone instead of kind of downplaying it it's just food for thought it's a very cool looking stone and by putting that next one to it you've detracted from it follow the compass or nothing at all what I'm saying is I mean just as an idea I'm just throwing an idea past ya you pop that out and you just contour the dirt right down to the driveway and then they could put a bush in there they could put some some planting some features that highlight the stones instead of all right well we'll find out what you decide in a little bit so we're all done here Tim you got this front yard all wrapped up Mark's gonna mulch it all and plant it okay man his wife of a planter area there for tall grasses or whatever she wants to plant the kind of cooling coming out of there and I like I like the character stone you got that nailed just right the lines so I wasn't expecting this that's pretty cool-looking yeah so but now we've got quite a bit left over yep so we've got a we've got to start putting this yard back in place and cleaning up the driveway you only hold you only take small loads down so yeah just that kind of job where it didn't quite take two full loads so the next step is to put a little dirt in the bottom of our dump truck so we don't smash that up while we're loading up the rest of the boulders yep [Music] yeah a little bit more toward this the front part of the cab we got a little bit of the mone yeah that's good Tim is totally blind trying to do this there's no way that he can see vampires should be on that side to give him leverage that way he could put it down and hold himself up because right now the excavator thanks comater can handle it but it's just too tippy yeah they totem grapple I don't know if it's the machine or the grandpa but it's always been a problem hasn't it yeah yeah it was yeah it was it was hey why are you not rotating it around and putting your blade down so you can just prop up do you like do you like the you'd like to do the wiggly worm while you're trying to load them up okay no no that's fine so what he's saying is right now to hold that he's got to hold the button in the machine which does rob some of the power this thing is I don't know if it's the machine or the graph always [Music] wait I don't see him don't do nothing it could be literally in how did he go I'll make sure you weren't sitting in the bed of the dump truck we drop a boulder on you we wouldn't call you trucker John we'd call you flat John yeah all right you see this little flick he does right here this is the test to make sure that he's got a good grip on that Boulder last thing he wants to do is get it over the cab of the truck and have the boulder slip free so he'll test it a few times every Boulder just before he goes to load over the side of a truck so this is pretty caked on I think we're gonna need the paddle the paddle sweep not to not to need a wheel I think we got to start with the paddle sweep that's the heavier thicker rubber and then migrate up to the needle wheel okay if the paddle sweep doesn't do a clean enough job so let's start with that there's two weeks of dirt that I've been getting ran on by a machine so ya might see how she does I guess it might be a bit bit of a challenge all right Sam let's start with this one we'll reserve that one yeah grab that one that one works better on heavier duty caked on stuff nice go [Applause] yeah surprised how well that's doing on this two weeks worth the baked on dirt [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that's doing way better than I thought dude I would have never guessed that that would clean this driveway that good [Music] so this is Nikita's multi-tool and it's running off from two of their batteries now this awesome will run off from gas so you can switch the power head out for a gas unit if you want here we're just testing out the battery platform we never thought this was going to do this our work ended up being able to clean this entire driveway on one and a half sets of batteries so we burned through a complete set of batteries we recharge them and took the second set of batteries and got about halfway down before we had this driveway to the point where we were satisfied [Music] all right you guys will tell me what you think of the video if you like these project videos I'll keep making them so this one was a nice little affordable front yard landscaping job I wanted to walk you through step by step you can kind of see the thought processes that go into each step of the project how we place boulders is actually pretty important you don't just slap them in the ground and think they're gonna look good that does take a little bit of artistic talent and I want to hear from you guys if you want more of these I will try to make some more of these videos for you guys hope whatever project you're working on turns out great god bless you guys and they go get through that