Speaker 1: You took it from me last week, I remember.

Speaker 2: There's no doubt that pavers make the absolute best road based material available period, hands down. History has proven it. There's been roads built out of pavers and stones that have been around since 2500 B.C. Now you can't say the same thing for asphalt or concrete, but pavers are subject to three typical kinds of failure. Rotational failure, vertical failure and horizontal failure. We're going to cover those, so hopefully you can prevent them and build your own driveway, that'll last maybe not 2500 years but it'll last longer than you or me both.

Speaker 2: Now in the past you've seen me make a video talking about how about the base is the absolute most critical element to the overall success of your project and this still holds true. But for pavers, it goes a little bit further than that. If you happen to have an asphalt or a concrete driveway, we're going to cover some of the similarities in failures that you...

Retaining Wall Blowout

Well, this is not a sight that you want to see on your property. As you can see, we have a retaining wall failure. I was given a call by this client of ours to come out and take a look at this wall and see what we could do to help them with it. This is not a wall that we built. This wall is seven years old and the remainder of the wall runs down the side of the driveway looks to be in pretty good shape. So, they came home one day after a hard rain storm and noticed that this wall had fallen down. Let's take a look at why this wall failed. If we look into the next door neighbor's yard, we will see a beautiful new landscape. Look at all that nice rock work and those nice rocks stairs. However several weeks ago this was all wooded and this hillside was not clean and pine straw. Rather this hillside had a lot of vegetation on it. That vegetation prevented a lot of silt sediment from washing downstream. So, you can see this water comes downstream into this low...

How to Build a Retaining Wall

Retaining walls fail for a number of reasons and I want you guys and gals out there that are installing retaining walls to learn a few tips and tricks of the trade that will help you improve your installation skill, and we'll separate you from the herd. What I am going to show you at the site today is a really common reason why a retaining wall falls apart. The first thing that we look at is the choice of blocks. A lot of times, landscapers will migrate towards the cheapest block and they tend to be hollow and have a lip on the back and neck. They're solid on the top and then they're hollow on the bottom, and what happens is that water can get trapped in there between the cavity and it has nowhere to go. Then it goes through a freeze-thaw cycle, expands, contracts and pushes the blocks over. They also have an inadequate pinning system. Because they're light, they're easy to pick up and they're fast to install. You see they have their connection method...