Landscaping Renovation - Dry Creek Bed River Stone Drainage, Retaining Wall, Zoysia Sod
I want to give you a walk-through of a job we completed that has just about every type of service that we offer on it. The job started off to do the work for this house right. We were doing a retaining wall to fix the drainage, clearing the back yard, irrigation system, sod, pavers, landscape lighting, and fencing. So, we started off working here and about day 2 into the project, the neighbor came over and said, "listen we've been getting bids on our back yard for 5 years." They had huge drainage problems. If you can see, the water came down from that area and just washed out the whole backyard. There was no sod, and it was overgrown with weeds. All that water came downhill into this property. It’s a big natural area so where I'm standing. This was just no backyard. It was all completely down to bare dirt with a lot of channeling where all the water had flowed into the property. Our job was to fix all of that. As I said, this neighbor came over and said, "Hey, what can you do for us?" So we offered them a really good price. We came in here and said we'd do their backyard as well. We turned a project that was going to be about day project into 2-projects. Today is now day 7 on this project. So in 7 days, we've done both properties and it's just been an amazing project for us. It has been profitable and the home owners have been great to work with. So I'm going to walk you through what we've got here.
Patio Addition
This is a 48ft x 12ft concrete slab and what we've done is extend it onto their existing patio. So, they wanted to make their concrete patio larger. As most of you know, I tend to over-engineer things. So, every 5ft along the length of this concrete we've drilled rebar into the existing concrete. We put 57 stone underneath this new pad to help reinforce it as well. This concrete is in the back yard, so we hired a line pump to come in and pump this concrete to the back. We had the whole thing poured probably in 2 hours from the time the concrete truck started filling up the line pump. This made it super easy and of course we spent another several hours finishing everything off.
Drainage
We're going to be putting a fence from here to here. We're going to add a gate in here when it's all done. We've sod about 4000 square feet. This was just a mess when we got here with a lot of drainage problems. We graded everything out and extended this back yard to nearly double the size. So, one other cool area that I want to show you here is this retaining wall behind me. When you walk over here so you can get a good shot of what that looks like. This is an Allen block retaining wall. Each unit is 18" wide by 8" tall with a straight faced design. We've got geo-grid in the back. There's number 57stone behind the whole wall with a French drain pipe at the bottom.So, this was designed to help stop all the water that was flowing and you sloping off here.
Dry Creek Bed
So, behind this wall, we have the main portion of what is capturing our drainage water, and that is a dry creek bed. So again, you can see all these properties are sloped downhill from each other. As the water comes down it's going to get captured in this direction and flow through here. We've made it a lot wider here as it rounds this corner and makes almost a 90o turn. Finally, it discharges into this back natural area away from the property. This is our last day on the project and last night we had a tremendous amount of rain. I was thinking about this project and I knew it would work great, but it was great to come out here this morning and see that this thing performed beautifully. So, we have absolutely zero issues. Since this homeowner allowed us to do the work on their house, everything here just flows together very nicely. We have landscape lighting. We're going to have 7 path lights that are going to line side of this house. Low voltage LED path lights are going to be going in the first part of next week.
Paver Pathway
The paver walkway is about 42" wide. This is a Belgard Holland stone paver pathway. We've got it in herringbone pattern we have one brick length along the 8inch length running lengthwise in that's called a sailor course. If this was turned 90o perpendicular where you see the edges on the foreign side, that would be called a soldier course. Sailor course long ways and soldier course, short wave running perpendicular. On these narrow paths, I tend to use a sailor course because it takes up less distance of the herringbone pattern. It's really easy to install too because you can see that we have exactly half cuts to make going down. So we'll make these have cuts in about an hour and a half just pop the bricks in. We're going to finish it with a hallmark joint sand as we do on all of our paver work. So this was the neighbor's house that we decided to work on. We wanted to keep the budget down a little bit so, underneath their deck area, we've installed about 10 cubic yards of decorative rock. Underneath the rock we installed a geotextile filter fabric because we don't want to have a lot of weeds growing up. We also don't want the dirt that's below to migrate in with this stone. So, 6 months from now, they don't just have dirt stone.
