Replacing Retaining walls -Start to finish

all right you guys well if you've been following along we're at shangri-la shangri-la douche is over there and shangri-la is our first priority and we demolished and took the whole front face of the house off let me show you what we did some of you guys wanted to know now a couple things back story here twice in the last 20 years the water has flooded and came up to about there and it consequently what happened is our wall rotted out but it didn't rot out from that okay i need to point that out because we have rebuilt these walls if you take a look inside we use concrete and we've rebuilt all of these walls all the way up and behind the stone this has all been fully waterproofed from this point down and that waterproofing is a redundancy you can actually see it we folded it over the edge of the footing because if the water ever does come up again that waterproofing is not going to do anything because if the water comes up to this height i have to do this i have to open up the door because you can't have eight feet of water pushing in on a wall and have nothing over here you have to equalize pressure so when the water comes up you just open up the door so that waterproofing isn't really going to be keeping any water out it's more just for peace of mind for any water that falls hits goes back backwards and it just protects our thing better so now we're going to take all of these boulders out there i'm going to take those i'm going to push them over there i'm going to grab some of that sand move it up where lucy's making her little she loves the sand pile that's why i brought that's why i brought sand in you can see her laying down my grandkids love it and the dogs love it so i'm going to save that sand move it up top and then i'm going to remove this block wall and then i'm going to carve a path right through here because i don't want to walk down and around anymore i want to go between the tree and this wall and we're going to try to use those boulders that we have up top to make them make this wall disappear i know that's going to be like what are you talking about dirt monkey well i don't want you to know where the wall starts i want to try to make this so that it looks like the whole house is just coming out of this bluff down below and then of course we got a lot more work to do after that but one thing at a time we're going to be using the natural i don't know topography geography just what's around this indigenous to this area for our materials and this is actually actually some sandstone and you can see i got some pretty massive pieces some of these are five and six foot long some of these weigh close to two ton each that's a two ton that's a two ton that's a two ton this is about 1500 pounds that's two that one's probably about eighteen hundred pounds and the guy at the aggregate pit where i was working at he's like how can you look at them and point get figured i'm like dude lifting boulders my whole life he's like well i don't think you're right because he had three i had three boulders left over so he goes over with his loader i'm like those weigh just a titch over a ton each and he's like no they're like 700 pounds 800 pounds they're over just a titch over a ton each so when i call that a two-ton boulder that is a two-ton boulder i'm not guessing i'm using some of the experience i've gained from moving these things and i need to know how much they weigh because i'm only going to be using an rt75 asb to do the entire install with some jinx forks that's my tools so let's get to work [Music] concrete blocks come in pretty handy sometimes as well as little pieces of concrete like this and other little pieces of concrete so you get a boulder that's pretty close but it's not quite right you can throw a wedge underneath it and get it exactly how you want it decisions decisions okay i don't like that line of course that's one of the original lines when they were mining that might be cool but it looks artificial but it's history right where we got this side how do i want to put it right in that corner i want to set back i don't want it flush to this rock i want it fitted tighter into this corner but not tight i want to up forward a little bit that way if i want to put a flat one over the top i still can okay this is the easy part to be honest with you the first stones are always the easiest everything after them gets a lot more so i have zero capability of rotating this boulder once i have it in the bucket so before i go to place this into the wall i have to determine which side i want out and how i want the boulder to actually be placed into the wall and then i have to come in and grab the boulder in a way that allows me to just gently set it in place without moving it afterwards the bucket is not my first choice for moving around boulders and rotating them and flipping them a good set of forks is a lot easier to handle and so that's what i'm going to use on this next boulder i want that boulder to set back and tight and it's not quite doing what i need it to i want these boulders to be close to the wall but no way shape or form should they put any stress or weight on the foundation of the house in fact these boulder walls put zero pressure onto the foundation of this i want to have a flowing transition from the rock on the house to the boulders and the landscaping i don't want to see a seam or have that line of delineation that notes one from the other i want everything just to flow together i don't like how this folder is sitting and i want to get it out of here this is where it gets tricky as i'm trying to remove it if that boulder flops forward it'll be the most pressure on this house yet and i don't want these boulders touching the foundation of this house this next boulder is actually too heavy to carry down straight forward so i have to spin the asb bass backwards to get it down the hill [Music] hello i can get it to go that way about that far without going kennywompus which never happens watch if it does be awesome [Music] who did we get her to touch without going through the foundation these are that's about a three-ton boulder that's a two-toner and that's a about 1500 pounds and we got her to touch nice the corner is established how are we looking up top though oh i like it oh okay but is it stable is it stable it's gotta pass the walk test because kids are always gonna be yes of course the beginning is the easiest and that only took me an hour and a half but now i'm going to put another boulder right there and it's going to be a seat stone so as you come out [Music] right in front of the lake now this is a seat stone too right right in front of the lake let's keep going let's have some fun let's just go randomly grab another stone so here's my extremely scientific process i go up top i look at this dog and i go you're probably a good one then i grab [Music] it really is close this is okay i'm okay with the top here i'm not okay with that but if i move that down now i've lost this boulder [Music] because you know people are going to be using these as steps took about three hours and i didn't i wanted to eliminate the wall give it some setbacks so these will be planting beds boom boom planting beds i want to have some creeping vines coming out i'm going to fill all them in i still got to put a boulder in here but my sun is going down so that's going to end it for today tomorrow and the next video we're going to come in here but we're not just going to do what we did on this side we're going to dig a path so that we can create an s-curve so the wall will come out and go around actually it'll go in out and around and die over there so this will be walking and if i'm good maybe i can get an easy spot to climb up stairwise if i was smart i would have done i tried to do it how did it turn out yeah you can climb it it's not exactly the easiest is it but you're not breaking your neck all right you guys hopefully i'll see you tomorrow on the next one when we go after that one god bless you guys thanks for joining along thank you for tuning in thank you for watching thank you for commenting thank you just for being part of my audience man you know what you guys make it honestly the funnest it can be so thank you you guys have a good one you guys we'll see you on the next one