LANDSCAPE FLOP to FUNCTIONAL SPACE in under 10 DAYS

LANDSCAPE FLOP to FUNCTIONAL SPACE in under 10 DAYS – The landscape at Brook & Pond started out as a big FLOP, but with some planning and education, you too could turn your FLOP into a Functional Outdoor Living Space. Tips and How-To right here.

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hey everybody coach here welcome to this week’s video hey uh look what’s behind us and the the whole premise of this video is going to be about momentum execution a little bit of planning and then carrying it out from start to finish I’m not going to talk the whole time this face isn’t going to be before you we’re going to show you some time lapse of various parts of this backyard makeover and we took it from a useless backyard to a yard that we can actually use uh for outdoor living for additional parking for beautification for blocking of wood piles and other utilitarian uh parts of the yard so I hope you enjoy it you’ll hear me once in a while throughout the video and then I’ll be back with you in a few minutes to wrap it up glad you’re here let’s get started [Music] so you remember uh the drainage part three where we had Jared come out and blast through that ledge Stone well I had him for another hour and 20 minutes and I turned him loose and I turned him loose in excavation of the Hill that was behind our yard and that’s what he’s doing here right now Excavating down almost 24 in to give me a base from which to work with we went out about 15 F feet from the house and all the tailings went up on the hill uh and you’ll see bits and pieces of that but this is the beginning and this right here was very much an aha moment this was the part in which I said this can happen and it’s easy enough to dig in where we can actually grow stuff the other thing I can suggest is even if you’re doing in a DIY style landscape project is make sure you call 811 and know where you where utility lines are in our case everything comes in on the pole but from the pole to the house the idiot that built this place only put a 2in schedule 80 electrical conduit down 16 in at the pole pad that you can see here and only 2 in below the ground near the house so as I’m having Jared excavate stuff out here definitely definitely as he gets close to where I know that power line is I literally had to guide him in the shovel to where to dig and extricate the the soil out around it so make sure you know we have phone lines that are on pole we have power lines that are on pole and we don’t have cable here because we have starlink there’s no gas lines that go to the house or anything else so we were in the clear for that [Music] so down to my final subsurface grade here you can see the level on the the board there that is actual level ground and so I have purposely taking the subsurface grade down at about 6 in from house to uh cut line there on the hill and I I’m not worried about that much of a slope right now because I know I’m going to backfill it but it gives me a reference on what to do right now all I’m doing is cleaning up the rocks and Kibbles and bits that were left over here so I have a really good idea of uh what I’m working with and how much material do I need to import so that I can get this thing to a/ quar inch grade the previous owners here both the original Builder and the person that we bought it from uh had some problems with burrowing rodents mice Norway rats and a woodchuck and in this particular case in order to solve that they put this a paper mill tarp there and backfilled it with River Cobble which hey I guess it did the job sort of uh but we decided to do just a little more of a permanent solution so I’m removing the Cobble out of the way and going to use it down in the stream beds for uh rip wrap and that kind of stuff and you’ll see what I do here with a concrete shoulder in just a minute so this small little uh concrete shoulder is a great way to seal off the underp part of this heating oil shed that you see right before you and what I wanted to do was to seal it all the way up on all sides and yet still allow the heating oil door to be able to open and still be able to know that when I bring in my gravel materials is just going to disappear so it’s uh it’s a a win-win by getting rid of the burrowing capabilities and at the same token it’s not going to be visible so as you’re going through the process of a project uh for the person that has the idea shall we say or has the vision or is put it down on paper one two three of you it doesn’t really matter as long as you have a direction and you know the 15-step checklist that I do on the website for you is a a inval valuable tool so that you know which step is coming next to make it a success and that 15 Step is in my head all the time but in this case okay I’ve got the shoulder down and now I want to visually acue myself to the next phase and that is where is the boulder wall going to go how many Boulders am I going to need because we have not selected The Boulders out yet so I took some spray paint and started marking out what I thought uh The Boulders would take up as as far as space and it allowed me to go to the Quarry and pick out a number of Boulders and we got about 40 of them [Music] [Music] this compactable gravel that I bought from uh one of our local excavating companies is a fantastic product in order to Compact and create a very solid new substrate that I can put on the final gravel layer later on this particular step here really no pun intended solidifies the whole gravel patio to begin with if this isn’t compacted in wet down and compacted again we can have that squishiness effect in uh large rain events and stuff so we really really paid close attention to this phase and it turned out really well moisten compact moisten repeat this is how you get a compaction type of gravel to sit down very very very hard almost like building a highway or building a driveway it’s the same principle except in this case I don’t have a vibratory plate compactor I have a coach compactor and I have a tractor to wheel compact it and it still came out very very hard and it’s been proven in a couple of heavy rain events since we’ve done and completed the [Music] project so with the ex material that I had left over from the base of the patio area I use that compactable Aggregates to do a ring around the hill Island that we’re landscaping and what that accomplished was it gave me a very stable platform on which I could put the boulders later on that I knew was going to be level I knew was going to be malleable enough if I needed to move something around and it just made it better than the natural soil to play with heavy Boulders on I’ll spare you the closeup of old man chicken white legs here but what I’m doing is we had uh almost an afterthought and I actually made a mistake here but I strung uh some low voltage lighting cable from the house to the island itself and all I’m doing is trenching through the the substrate that we just compacted down but come back and and Tamp it back in and it’s as good as new later to find out an aha moment is I got power right in the island itself and I didn’t need to do this but we’ll use that cable in another fashion later on down the road [Music] [Music] so our next phase was going to be the final um stone dust gravel top on this and it was very very uh important to make sure that I kept between an eighth and a/4 inch fall grade from house out to uh Island for drainage and we had a great rain event couple of days ago and there was hardly any sign of ponding or pooling here uh I was I was able to take it from the center of the patio and slope it towards the driveways in each Direction and then from the house out to the island is where I had an eigh inch pitch so it kind of comes down you can feel it as you walk it comes down from the house and then it kind of flattens out towards where the boulders are going to go and then it slopes sideways along the boulder wall towards the driveway so any water that is going in there is a perking out and B excess is going to run off to the sides [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] I’ll tell you if you take on something like this um build it into your budget to have Machinery help you we had 10 cubic yards of the compactable aggregate base we had uh 15 cubic yards of the stone dust which all did not go here on this patio as far as the stone dust gravels a lot of it we used around the driveways and and down by the road Etc but in order to expedite the process and not break a body up so much by just filling a wheelbarrow over and over and over again especially when you’re not used to that kind of work rent a piece of Machinery borrow a piece of Machinery that can do this for you and it’ll make the job a heck of a lot faster much more enjoyable and the finished product is still going to going to be perfect for you so don’t forget to work smarter not harder and use machines where you can [Music] [Music] [Music] and so bringing this up to the the gravel patio finishing and we have a 1-in rock band around the foundation of the house and what I did that for is a couple of reasons mainly winter ice drip so that it’ll drop on the bigger gravels and not on my stone dust patio even though it would probably be frozen up by that point in time I still didn’t want to create a an ice situation so it’ll perk through just a little bit easier again we’re going to moisten and compact moisten and repeat and compact this top stone dust gravel down to a rock hard finish and it really did a good good job of doing that and I only used a hand tamper and the tractor and then came back with the leveling rake and red it out one last time and then we finish some things off later on down the road [Music] [Music] [Music] if you guys end up having uh Boulders and stuff delivered to you at your home for your project and you have a way of getting them from where they’re placed to where they need to go a couple of considerations if you dump them in the street and they’re going to be of sizable uh dentle pavement type of Boulder make sure you go out and get some protection because cities and counties can come after you if you end up damaging the roadway put down some uh trashy plywood or something like that and if you back that type of a truck across the city sidewalk and onto your driveway do the same thing with the plywood but make sure make sure that your driveway can handle this kind of weight because there’s lots of times that trucks like this or cement mixers can drive up onto a residential three and a half inch maybe not even supported or reinforced type of driveway and crack that thing in half so be aware of that when you’re placing Boulders and you’re wrangling rocks like I’m going to be doing here in this in this segment remember this do little stretching know that your body unless you’re doing this kind of work every day is going to take a toll but also remember selecting out the boulders won’t totally be up to you all the time you may have to work with the ones that are accessible initially and you just have to remember the spacing when you get into placement and you have to remember the amount of weight that you’re dealing with this is not something that you can just put into a wheelbarrow these guys here uh start at about 300 lb and go up to about 500 lb and there’s even one that we couldn’t move Mo with the tractor it’s still in the pile out there so plan ahead for machinery and plan ahead of what Boulders are going to go we take some time go out there and look at them and see how they lay or how thick they are and where they’re going to stack in it’ll really help you out and sometimes it actually is magical when you pick the right Rock for the right place so one of the things that I did with this is that I knew what was available to me at the Quarry wasn’t always perfect and there were ones that were too big uh to manhandle or certainly even with a tractor be able to move around but I knew I needed vertical vertical height in order to accomplish the task of backfilling and using all the soil that I that I had on the hill so a lot of them with this charcoal slate rock that the Quarry had I knew I had to be able to vertically stand them up but have them thick enough to where they would be stable even shimming them and stuff in place they would be stable for the the forces of all that dirt to come down on them and they wouldn’t just flop over so consider that if you’re consider height versus depth versus weight versus manageability [Music] [Music] [Music] so with the boulders in place now we can move on to the next next phase and that is backfill and I’m deliberately made the uh the boulder wall out just a little bit and kind of using a little bit of a swag s scientific wild ass guess um to how much space and how much backfill area was going to be needed based on the height of my hill and tailings that I had in there and it turned out pretty darn close I there was some high parts of the hill where I made sure the boulders were out a little bit further and then you’ll see you know where it came out at and it turned out uh turned out okay for us it really did this soil that we have is by no means a perfect perfect planting medium not by any stretch of the imagination it has very little organic matter in it at all it’s mostly just uh clay uh Sandy loms and rock and that’s basically what it is it’s not a soil that I’m very accustomed to to at all in using so I had to make sure that we cleaned off the surface of all the larger Rock which is what I’m doing right here and then I know I had to introduce a lot of organic matter and one thing we don’t have where we live here up in northern Maine is good sources of compost and that kind of stuff you would have to go out and make it yourself and that takes a long time to compost stuff up but the the bagged products that I’m using here uh the garden soil is a a great start and then even the finishing touches that we put on top of the plants and everything they will break down over time as well so it’s going to be okay uh but it’s not ideal so know what kind of soils you have and know what you’re going to have to do to counteract their uh drawbacks or their negativity so that you have a good planting medium in this day and age plants are a very expensive commodity to go out and and Landscape your your property with this is a shiny example of using Facebook Marketplace and box store clearance in order to accomplish a goal at a reasonable budgetary uh limit many many of these plants that we have here we got at a garage sale for $4 or less and the roded dendrons that we’re planting in here were 50% off at one of the box stores and then the only real expensive part was the trees those hit us hard but we still stayed at or below budget when it came to the plant material now we just had to get them in the ground and take care of them and watch them like we had a new baby in the house and get them through the next month without any sort of transplant shock or stress and the weather really cooperated with us too so the planning technique that you’re seeing here is the it almost looks like I made a mistake I make sure that that root ball is sticking up at least an inch out of that uh planting hole and I have a good water basin around it the big tree that you’re seeing go here right now I had to make sure that it’s perfectly planted I had to make sure that the root boundness was addressed by roughing up some of the circular root that was in there and I had to make sure that that root ball and that root flare is up and exposed I know that this Hillside is going to settle over time and I don’t want that crown of those trees or those plants to settle down and have soil collect around the crown and end up some kind of a crown rot situation they’re just too expensive so make sure you plant correctly and the first one is the best plant and the last one is the best plant to go in the ground but do not do not waver as far as Perfection on any of them that you’re putting in because every single one of them needs to be done correctly SM [Music] that measuring technique using a shovel handle was taught to me decades ago and it’s a real easy way to measure the root ball in the can and then transfer your uh your thumb measurement on the handle down to the hole itself initially my hole was too shallow but a secondary read on the shovel handle measurement and down in the hole I knew that I was going to be right on and it’s a very quick measurement you don’t have to carry a tape measure around with you unless you want to and it can be an easy reference it was just one of those in the field little tips that was taught to me when I was literally 18 or 19 years old and it has served me very very well ever since so maybe it’ll be useful for you as well you can see my organic matter that I’m mixing up and putting back in and around that root ball that root ball has to get retrained from the circular root style of growth that it has been accustomed to for so long by roughing up those edges and using that softer soil we’re going to reprogram that tree to send out into that transitional PL hole into the nice rich organic environment that we’ve created for it if not if you plant a really root bound tree often times it’ll sit there and keep growing for a very long time in its circular fashion and never get out into the soil like it should um until a Following Season or Beyond and I need this thing to get out and establish itself before winter and have it stable not only from winds and weather but also U the amount of root system in there so that when it goes to sleep it’s going to have plenty of storage capacity uh to store all its sugars and carbohydrates and be able to ready to go for next spring and really really hit the gas pedal as far as growth so the planting phase took about three hours total uh from the time I started raking all the big rocks off till the time I finished the last hosta went went in the ground was about 3 hours and it’ll kick your butt if you’re not used to getting up and down up and down digging and doing all the stuff so give yourself plenty of time give yourself a half day give yourself depending on how much you’re putting in the ground give yourself a freaking weekend if you need to and pace yourself out uh we were very very blessed with cool Breezy weather that day when we planted in the morning so that we had nice cool temperatures to work in far less bugs to have to deal with and we were able not to have to stress the plants out any more than they already get stressed transplanting anyway but it was in the the high 60s when we put stuff in the ground and it got up to mid 70s by the end of the afternoon but by then they were in they were watered in and we just kept an eye on them and we saw nothing nothing since planting day that indicates transplant shock at all so since we had company coming in over the weekend we wanted to wrap this thing up we wanted to put a little bit of bow and a little bit of lipstick on this pig of a project so we doubled right back the very next day and went back down to the box store and got a bunch of bagged mulch there is no good reliable source for bulk mulch up here in our area so we have to rely on bagged material and we upgraded to a a product that was a little more than their on sale bag mat material it was a much better uniform texture and this mulch is going to do a lot of things number one it’s going to retain moisture in the soil number two it’s going to weed growth for a long long time and it’s also going to insulate the root zones so that they can get established slowly and not get sunbaked and bake off into a crusty top layer of the planting bed that is there so it’s worked out really well not only that but it also stabilized the soil because we had two big rain events since planting day and everything behind me looks really really good we don’t have any runoff or anything else so the mulch really stabilize the planting Hill uh in total when you’re spreading mulch I I strongly suggest that you use a grass rake you can place the bulk of it with a steel tined rake but when you start doing finishing touches use a grass rake and use the tines pointing down to move some of the mulch to where you need it to go use your bare hands around the plants but then to smooth it out and don’t leave it so choppy looking take that rake and turn it and invert it up and just slide the grass rake across the mulch upside down and you’ll find that it’ll take out the humps and bumps and give you a nice finished look just a tip [Music] sure [Music] even now after hundreds of Landscapes that I have put in this part of the landscape project phase right here is extremely rewarding if you’re doing it for yourself it’s even that much more it’s a proud moment for you you’ve done all the work you’ve put the Sweat Equity in and you have a finished product that you can stand back and look at and go man we really did a lot here and and this took a total of nine calendar days putting in about 5 to 6 hours per day depending on the weather and the availability of materials at the time and from the time you saw that excavation to the finished product right here was about 9 days so not too bad for part-time work and we’ve created an outdoor living area where we’d prefer to be in the backyard now during the hot afternoon noon times of day rather than outside the front where it’s uh Western southwestern exposure and it’s really really hot so we’ve done ourselves a good service and I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the transformation wrapping this up watering after planting uh the soil here was still really kind of moist because we’ had some rain so I knew I didn’t have to saturate the soil again I just needed to give each plant one good drink but since it started to warm up again right at the end of planting day we up into the 70s and because uh it had been Breezy a great way to stop trans evaporation immediately and slow it down is to moisten the ground and moisten the leaves that are there it instantly slows that process down so you don’t end up with any sort of transplant shock or the plant cannot up take enough water fast enough to prevent wilting so don’t be afraid to go out there and soak the area down and Mist it down not just once but as long as the as long as the the weather dictates that you need to do whether it be a planting bed whether it be a seed bed for a new lawn a new sod lawn make sure that you take a hose out there because hoses will get you through that first 30 to 45 days irrigation systems will get you through a mature Landscape Maintenance and watering schedule don’t rely just on sprinklers all the time make sure you have a hose at the ready so how do we do on budget well compared to the the picture that you saw in the beginning of the video and compared to now do you think this is an investment that’s worth just under $3,000 I think it is we’ve created a nice outdoor living environment we’ve improved the functionality of the backyard tremendously and we didn’t break the bank totally on the budget we we shopped around and found good plant material at a very very reasonable price and we had the materials gravels and substrate and boulders nearby so there wasn’t huge delivery costs and we are able to do it for under $3,000 so drop in the comments below what do you think think we overspent think we underspent how much would you have spent to accomplish this right here well I hope you got a little bit of something out of this one you know we uh we got a head a steam going right at the end of the drainage and we carry that momentum with all the things that we’ve already talked about here in this video to the finish line and there’s still a little bit more to go we’d like to throw a boulder or two up here on the island we have some lighting cable that is strung already we may put some lighting in and we have some containerized stuff that we’d like to uh accessorize the area it doesn’t quite look so much like a driveway once we get it all uh furnished and decorated up but hey this is what a week and a half can do for you if you get it going and you know exactly where your end point is what the goal is and how to finish off a landscape project to where you can come out have an adult beverage sit back after a nice cold shower and sweaty and by the way if you guys want to be part of the three-b T-shirt Club I invite you to go over to patreon where we’re going to give a few extras here and there and some free advice all you got to do is ask anyway I appreciate your time I appreciate you sticking around don’t forget about the website yard coach.com thank you to those who reached out and signed up for a video consultation I really appreciated Kevin and Christine and Mona I really really do and anytime you guys need more help reach out and take advantage of it for those of you who have not the yard coach Channel and the website help out you DIY people and save lots and lots of money guys I will catch you guys next week as always to your landscape success and goodbye for now