Water is wrecking my house! Can Regrading fix that?!? Start to finish in 4 k

good morning you guys we've got a little bit of a tricky situation with the grades going on out here and we're getting water coming into the building and you can see exactly what i'm talking about with the grades now anytime i go in to a situation like this to assess it i always come up with three i have three options when those three options are to regrade to get the water to flow away from the structure install french drains if the regrading isn't enough and then full-fledged foundation waterproofing where we dig down along the found edge of the foundation expose the foundation wall expose the footing and put foundation waterproofing membrane over the wall wrap it over the footing and then install a drain tile system i don't think we have to go that deep on this one i think we can cure a lot of the things that we're going to be doing right here just with grades alone so i always try to start with the least invasive which is grading and then go on from there but if you take a look right here you see how the the grades are pitching right in toward the house i mean you can just see this is this is way too high very typical situation all way too high now technically we're supposed to have eight inches above the sill plate i mean below the sill plate the ground should be that far below the sill plate and the sill plate is where the concrete wall hits and then there is a plate it should be green treated and then on that is where you're stick framing and what happens is the water will come down it'll hit the ground and it'll bounce back up you can actually see all the spackling right here you can see it's the uh the rain is hitting bouncing hitting bouncing and that constant wet dry wet dry wet dry leads to the rod that's why you gotta have the eight inches because it gives you just enough space that it just stays dry it's not constantly wet dry so we've got a lot of work to do here if we're gonna try to achieve any of that i don't know what we're gonna be able to achieve just with grading alone but that's what we're gonna start with the first thing we got to do is stop is just get this hill to not flow right into the back of the property looks good [Music] now we're not going to be hauling anything out or anything in we're going to try to balance the site as best we can we're going to try to use the only materials that we have available to us on the site and one of the prerequisites that we need to do is we need to maintain a road going down to the lake this is the access road and so this can't be cut down without building something here so we want to be careful how we grade this out and we also got to have a second access path going down that way so the soil that we generate from the cut procedure there is going to be flipped up here to build an elevated parking pad which means coming through here i'm going to have to do something i'm going to cut this out flip this up and build a wall on the back side this is part of what makes this an interesting job is this tight it's a big machine in a tight spot there's not much room for forgiveness so i'm gonna cut my path in right here it's gonna have to be wide enough not only for the machine but for the boulders as well i've got excess boulders here so i'm gonna use my boulders [Music] just build this up so i can get the water to pull a little better away from here [Music] so this soil that i'm generating right here is going to be used for a more level spot up there and to define the drive areas oh that's not how it's supposed to work [Music] all the way up i don't need all that power it's just sand [Music] and it just gives me more control over the machine if i'm careful if i get myself in trouble i might have enough time to get myself out of trouble i'm going to try to build myself a big enough work area that i don't get myself in trouble right [Music] so [Music] is this the interior framing yeah is that for the walls too frankie is that enough yeah 30 of them you got 30. yeah i don't know if enough it's going to be close but you know with that back one but yeah [Music] all right we've got the wood hauled in for frankie you know every little thing he can do helps out that's the way i look at it even if it's not something big amazing or important one less thing on somebody else's plate let's take a look at what we got going on here and you notice i'm setting these forward this is all going to get pushed in filled in this is where the grades will really be achieved in here and if this gets worse then this allows me to french drain this area pick everything up and flow it down i don't think it's going to get that bad but let's finish up the boulder wall problem is we out of boulders we only got one of those left but we got a whole row of regular boulders so what we're gonna end up doing is coming down here and grabbing a few of these that at least look like all of our other ones i was hoping to save a few for the landscaping but we need them for the grading and i see two right there that look like they'd fit pretty dece at least go you know what i mean go they got to be angular kind of brownish we want them to match we don't want to have all these boulders have this look and then all of a sudden you got one bright pink one or some goofy thing like that all right let's go carefully pick a boulder out of the wetlands [Music] this doesn't go all right see those two don't go that one not so much i could put that cornerstone right there now i need the space i need the space i see these aren't even touching i gotta come in and adjust [Music] adjust well let's see if the keys are in frankie's truck because i'm gonna be re-grading in here although it's not technically in the way rather be safe than sorry [Music] all right we've got some space you can fix the grates machines thirsty asb needs a drink let's feed her what she wants that means i drank 20 gallons of fuel since yesterday yesterday it was a long day this machine put some time in yesterday so before we backfill let's get the nasty stuff buried does that sound bad i'm talking about rocks all the rocks oh stuff that's not gonna grow grass let's put that behind that wall it's not gonna it's not gonna grow grass [Music] waiting i want to be able to grow grass right up to the side of the cabin and that means i've got to change these grades not only to control water flow but to allow me enough space to bring in black dirt so that i can re-establish vegetative cover so when i'm cutting down for the subgrade for drainage control i'm adding a little extra so i can add material back in [Music] i did not like it still it's not perfect but it's one of gods headers don't have any more boulders because i wouldn't mind having a little bit more in the middle so i could create a crest hmm hmm in the middle so the water sheds that way and this way option one [Music] or do we just add a few boulders right here it's gonna look janky i don't like building from the back side but if we did put yeah and if it falls forward it's gonna roll right into the cabin not not a good scenario i just popped the forks off and i think i'm going to pop them back on and try to pop in a boulder setting to create a crest in the middle so i can get everything to pitch down to the sides instead of straight towards the back the pulse of my breath [Music] do you believe well i ended up putting more in than what i originally thought i was going to which is no big deal but now i've got to find some fill soil i've got some extra sand there but i think we can do one better we can grab some of this out of here and start to blend all of this stuff together a little bit better so that it flows more so let's start borrowing from in here putting it up there and getting everything to contour around together what this next step we'll do is get ready for seed now it's not ideal seeding conditions but we do have a lot of good sand which allows for free draining and we have a little bit of existing turf and black dirt and we're going to just incorporate all of that together because the turf is actually pretty solid let me show you [Music] now at this point this ground is not ready to start growing vegetation it's just too compacted it's had too much construction traffic on it for much too long and it needs to be scarified and loosened up by using the big power rake i can start to loosen up that soil and bring everything back together but this is not the final step this is just the intermittent intermediate intermediate step before we do the black dirt which is yet to come [Music] that's not a good way to end the day last run and i'm looking like where's this drip coming from inside here i gotta pull that open i gotta pull that apart find out exactly what happened all right good start bad ending right i don't want that hydraulic fluid leaking all over i'm gonna try to plant grass seed here but that's gotta end the day because i can't use that anymore and we're done anyway i mean if we take a look we got everything flowing blended in the grades are looking good the hill blends this whole thing blends all the grades pull down so let's take a look at some of these grades because this is what was the tricky part of the whole job site was getting these grades to blend by the sill plates now we had to break one of our own rules we were not everywhere eight inches below the sill plate because sometimes it's just not feasible but we do have the grade at least going the right way which is awesome so you can see that pipe there that's how much we've taken down and now we get everything to go this way this stuff flows this way i still got a hand touch up all in there that grade will go higher by that stone this will flow this way from that stone to this stone this will be the swale right through here we've got a peak water flows both ways we'll see it better from this side we've now divided a bucket dressing and maybe a grade or a drag i should say and we'll be good to go and that's this job all right you guys thanks for hanging out a little dirty today that means it was a good day hope you guys had a good day god bless you guys oh you want to hear something crazy uh i i was grading just now camera may have picked it up i don't know which camera would have picked it up an otter just ran from underneath my deck it's been i guess an otter has now made a home under my deck because last night lucy was going nuts i thought it was a cat for sure and i'm working in here an otter comes out rank right into the lake that's the first otter i've ever seen in the wild in my life and it's living in my cabin maybe i should live here more i don't know maybe it's a sign with that i will sign off god bless you guys go get em catch you on the next one