Starting a new hardscaping job- pt1

it's this color yep yep so um that's gonna look pretty sharp you like it yep this is gonna look sharp uh i'd be bummed if you said it's gonna look like crap [Music] oh man this is gonna be a good one today right good morning everyone blaine and i are starting a new site today we're hauling the skitty right now i'm not gonna lie to you guys this one's gonna be uh this one's gonna be a doozy it is a huge project yeah it's really not the size of the job that makes it a doozy it's just really complicated and so what we're gonna do is kind of take you along step by step how we put all the different pieces of the puzzle together on a job that has a lot of different moving parts man sam does that pretty good for being one-handed he's got the camera in one hand and he's got a down imagine how fast he'd work if he could use both his hands so this is the new asv rt50 and this is a really tight sight and the guys we're supposed to give this machine back and we just honestly the guys really liked it so [Music] so this is the back a lot of paper that is going to be a whole lot of paper so on this right here is our before walk through so on this job site we installed that paper driveway you seen earlier we're going to put pavers over these stairs and we're going to continue the pavers out the front i believe but here's where it really gets dilemma that driveway we have to cross over and then we have to go through this narrow gate and this is where man this is going to be a big one we've only got three inches of room that's why the guys really like that asp because it's skinny and it's doing it we got to remove that deck build an elevated deck a walkway and then connect that up to a retaining wall with a stair system that we had built a few years i grabbed it from stands but we got that real nice stand up that worm saw for cutting the radius and you can angle that yeah you can tip it walk behind yeah well blaine is gonna be running materials here for a decent chunk of the day um so first thing that we're gonna do while he's running if we're gonna get rid of this little deck aka famous blaine he was actually at a versalock picking up some materials and a guy walked down and the guy's like hey that's famous blade um yeah that deck is in really rough shape but why does he not have gloves on [Music] got a whole bunch of japanese beetles on there it's crazy though man if you take those things and you squish them it releases a pheromone that brings that that draws more of them in like the best way that i found to get rid of those is you gotta walk around with like a cup full of soapy water and knock them in there yeah that's true um on this deck this isn't exactly how i guess i would have first approached it i would have if i had the beak available the guys actually don't have the beak here but i would have just taken that asb went up to that deck grabbed it put pressure on it to see where it was connected to the house then cut those connections to the house and then pulled it all the way off but getting it out would be a challenge through that gate so then instead of cutting the deck down or the first scene i don't know if i would have done it but i would have seen if i could pick the whole thing up over the gate and dropped it down but this way works too holy crap i had to be carpenter that's pretty routed out i don't like how that pallet is loaded behind the back axles um there had to be another pallet because that would have made the trailer fishtail oh yeah there it is so they must have had that second pallet loaded in front of the axles to balance it out yeah be careful you don't want to get too much weight behind the back axles of a trailer because as you're going down the road it'll do this sort of thing [Applause] all right oh it's got gloves on finally it looks like they just nailed it in there there's no leg bolts or anything a lot of times there isn't maybe we just jump on it and pops up [Music] inches inches of room [Music] all right guys this is the plan for today that blaine's out getting some blocks for our huge paver project that we're working on oh hi sweet girl you're i haven't seen you in a while look at you hi sweet girl i'm so glad he doesn't talk to the rest of the crew like that in the meantime we're over at stands we gotta get some stuff oh hi sweet blaine how are you today sweet blade that's where it went that's my hatchet i was missing that we've got a checkout board in the garage i checked it so sam took it and he didn't check it out but then it was just like magically back a couple days later so now i know where my hedgehog went okay so this is going to be a raised patio that our base is super nice and level so we got the screed-o-matic 5000 that's how sam talks 24 7. screed-o-medic 5000. so we've got a couple different ways of building this raised patio now what we're actually going to be doing is using fill compacting it and i'm going to show you something pretty cool here in just a moment i cut a notch out of our screed-o-matic so that it'll sit where it needs to set on the blocks all right our base is all in get our first course of geo grid in and then so the next step we're gonna put another course of black in fill it up with class five pack the heck out of it it'll be another layer of geo grid we'll do one more chorus of the blocks pack the hell out of it and then we'll be sanding pavers on top of that this notch in the back is dead middle so let me talk about real quick hand cutting or hand chiseling a block like this once you get it down you can get it done in about 60 seconds or so or you can get a block splitter and get it down to about 13 seconds we got the negotiator eye protection and what i like to do i hope he's not allergic okay all i like to do is take and just kind of score it on each side and then we'll really start hammering on it to get it to split but the thing is when you get on a bigger project where you've got a ton of blocks to split you do want to have a block splitter because it just saves so much wear and tear in your guys so then when you go and score you know kind of score each side like this that just helps to get a little bit more even split let's talk about what he's doing here for a moment he's actually building his own units that's why we like these versalock standard units you see all these lines in the going across these blocks these are guidelines for us when we're out in a field we use those lines to build whatever block we need we don't have to order something we don't have to hope it's in stock we don't have to hope the colors match we can literally take any block and craft out in the field what we need for corners inside outside radiuses stairs and you're gonna see blaine does something really cool with these things in like a and moment it like a wall and we'll build a patio inside of it instead of just using blocks for the whole thing okay so what sam was saying is we could have used the pyramid method there and filled the entire core up with blocks now for a patio i think that's overkill what they're using is recycled class 5 and they're gridding it and that grid i told you is going to explain that what that does is that ties all of the sides of the blocks together so it can't explode outward now one thing about retaining walls a floating retaining wall so we're in the frost zone we we're gonna have frost heave this whole system is designed to float but that means it can't be tied to the house because that your house or structures up here are not designed to flow and so then you'd you'd have this weird angle if you actually tied it it would crack and break so the wall supposed to move evenly that's how they work but you can't have uh the soil underneath the wall doing the higgledy piggledy the soil underneath the wall has to all move evenly at the same time and this is all sam's camera work he's got some really cool shots so i hope that cleared up a little bit of that stuff screen-o-matic 5000 in action i think we'll have to snap this off or cut it probably cut it would be the quickest yeah cut this off okay well the brick is going to sit on the pavers we'll sit on this place it won't go down unless we get the sand high enough and that's gonna be just might as well just cut these off yeah see that's another thing like the versatility of these things we can just do what we need to do i don't know why they just if they're cutting them off why don't they just zip them with a saw though i don't know why they're chiseling them been done with it yeah we're going to cut some random chunks so you can you can't have the grid hashtag when you put grid in a wallet you have to have even grid throughout the whole wall you can't have grid and then a space then another layer of grid start because this space will make you block cantilever so sometimes you gotta put little ones in just to make sure that everything stays the same all right uh we got our that one and that one cut in there so this first course here is all good to go next step we're going to glue all this down flames out getting uh more geo grid because we ran out uh so while he's gone we're gonna glue all this we're gonna get all these glued down are we gonna glue them down sam and then uh start filling in with class five and then hopefully he should be back by then and we'll get the next course on and uh just keep jamming are we going to glue that course down sam all right you guys well hey um so we're going to call this one the scooby project blaine and sam are going to be on this one for a while so we're going to walk you through step by step every step of the process tim is wrapping up a project for the boulder retaining walls and then he's got some some really big retaining wall that he's going to be starting i'm going to be heading up north with frankie because we've got to get all the firewood for the entire season cut blocked and ready to go and then after that i'm gonna be starting a really nasty grading job that i'm not looking forward to um and we also got a really super cool mower that we're to be testing and so that's what we've got coming up down the pipeline god bless you guys go get them and hopefully we'll see you on another one cheers