Landscape MAKEOVER: A Tree Fell on This Clients House!

What's up, everyone? It's Mike andes here@landscapebusinesscourse.com. today we're going to be doing actually a prep on a job for sod. So tomorrow there's several thousand square feet of SOD coming. But today we're installing soil and mulch and prepping the site. And I'm actually visiting down south Washington at another location for Augusta Lawn Care down in Mount Vernon. So looking forward to this one. I'm going to hook you guys up to my chest mount here and hopefully learn something about how we do these SOD installs and how you can make money doing it.

How's it going? Pretty good.

How about yourself?

Good. Good. Of a funky driveway.

Right, Right.

Well, I'm joining for at least next couple hours. Oh, are you? I'm Mike. I don't think we've met yet. Sprague. Cool. And then this is Brennan. Good to meet you guys.

Yeah.

Yes. I was coming down from up from Seattle and I was like, hey, Tim, do you have a job I could, you know, help out for the next few hours? Like. Yeah, there's one. They're doing ready facade. So I got you guys ice cream sandwich. I don't know if you want one. There you go. Thank you. Cool you off a little bit. Got it, man. So this is the mulch, and I'm assuming they're kind of finishing up those beds.

Yeah, I just.

They.

I just realized they put the toilet in the way.

Oh, nice.

It was sitting over there.

Okay, cool. And then a little bit down. Oh, down to the bottom there.

Well, right.

Where that log is. We're going to kind of extend it out, I think, a little bit.

Oh, nice.

Looks uniform, you know.

Okay. Yep. And then the soil. The rest of soil will be going in. Or is all the soil down already?

We're supposed. Well, we got to do this yet.

Yep.

And I guess there's a little bit.

Up on the top corner.

We're trying to figure out how we're going to pull that off because they're supposed to be having a moving truck coming in today.

I'm assuming then the soil is going up top there.

I think it's going to be on that end of the house where the bark is.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

Sawdust and whatnot.

Yeah, that's me. Tough to get to.

Yeah, that's. Yeah, we're kind of going over this.

He's been going through the ditch to get the wheelbars over. Oh, no.

We've actually been going from the bottom part trying to get the trailer in a good spot. So we're not wheeling uphill, you know.

Gotcha.

The sod. We were kind of. We laid some sod, made a little bridge there when we were removing the sod.

Oh, gotcha. Well, we removed everything too. Oh, wow. Yeah.

We lay the tarp out and put it on the tarp.

Do we have a tarp?

I think so.

So it's mostly just this area and then that little bit up top there, right? Yeah, gotcha.

Down there. All right. So a little bit of background on this job. This is actually the second week of this job. The first week was the hardest part. Not only because they were removing the sod, which is like back breaking labor, using the sod cutter and then they had to manually use their just wheelbarrows and shovels to get it up to the trailer. But then also the fact that last week was one of the hottest weeks Washington state has ever had. So in our state, 110 degrees is unheard of. That's what the kind of temperatures we were having last week was. It was pretty brutal, pretty difficult. I think they actually paused the job for a little bit. But now we're just wrapping up the prep before the sod shows up tomorrow. So want to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing here. We aren't 100% finished, even towards the end of this video, because obviously they're coming back tomorrow. They're going to do the sod. They're going to fish up some of the edging. But I wanted to first go over a couple of equipment tips here. So this dump trailer that you're looking at right now is a 5 by 10 really small. But what's nice about it is you don't need anything more than a quarter ton pickup to actually pull it around. So a 1500 or F150 will be able to pull this little trailer around. And it's a double axle, so you can still get a few yards of material in here. You could build up the sides for leaves, etc. It is a little bit small, to be perfectly honest with you. As you begin to grow and do big leaf cleanups or brush removal or, you know, if you want to get 10 yards of multi, it's not going to happen unless you build up the sides with. With plywood or with two by fours. So right now what I'm doing, we obviously have the trailer at an angle to try to get the bark out. But because the driveway was an opposite angle, it just wasn't steep enough. To get a lot of the mulch out when we got a little bit lower. So I'd crawl up in there, push it down, and that's what we were doing there. Definitely want to use a tarp. When you're doing these molts on gravel, if you're doing on pavement or concrete, it's not so much of a big deal. But for cleanup sake, it's so much easier to use the tarp, and especially I don't show it in this video, but at the very end, when we were kind of like maybe a quarter yard worth of bark mulch left, I simply just dragged the tarp over to the last remaining part of the beds and dumped it out. No more cleanup, no blowing off. Really, really clean. So let's talk about the actual work we're doing here in terms of prepping the base for the sod. And I'm gonna stop here for just a second because we do a little bit talking. I'll show you around the job a little bit. Right now, we're just installing the last bit of the mulch on this hillside. They want this to be grass.

So, I mean, I don't know if we're supposed.

We're supposed to be here, or is it. That would make more sense.

Yeah, this would make more sense, wouldn't it?

I could send a picture real quick and just confirm it with them. Yeah, if you want to head out and get that soil, that'd be great. Yeah, we've definitely used three yards on this. So what we were doing there was confirming with the franchisee owner here, Tim, about exactly what the job was going to entail, because it wasn't super clear in the job notes or the video he gave us for project management in terms of exactly where they wanted the soil up top. And the reason for that was because this. This house actually had a tree fall on it. And the reason they're having all this landscaping done is because they got the settlement with the insurance company, and they're trying to get the tree chipped and all their landscaping redone. So all of this area used to just be a ton of weeds. You couldn't even see those ferns in the flower beds. It was just this whole hillside was a bunch of weeds. What makes it really, really difficult is all these different terraces and slopes and then a massive ditch around the back. And the axe is just horrible at all angles of this lawn. But what we're doing right now is just basically prepping the sod. You saw us putting the edging around the septic cap you can see me pulling out this massive root. That took a while and a little bit of strength to pull this thing out. And so just trying to get it as, as good as we possibly could without having to dump 4 inches of topsoil on the entire lawn. Because yes, you could do that, basically just bury the stones, bury all of the, the roots. But the client's budget just didn't allow us to put in 30 yards of topsoil here. So we're trying to make do putting like an inch. But in order to do so, we're taking out the rocks, pulling out the roots and just trying to make it as level as we possibly can. And so the rest of this whole video you're gonna see the right hand side of the screen. It's like blurry because it was on my chest and like pouring sweat. So it must have just been on the camera. But that's why it's a little bit, you know, fuzzy on the right hand side of the camera. But if you look at these wheelbarrows, these are flat, free tires on these wheelbarrows. Very important. Definitely do not skimp on your wheelbarrows. These are the Marathon and, and Jackson brand wheelbarrows. I'm not endorsing them or saying I think you must get them, but definitely just get good wheelbarrows. Don't get the cheap stuff from like true value. That's 50 bucks. They will many times fail after a couple jobs, especially when you start doing gravel or soil, like heavier type of materials. All right, so what type of soil we installing? This is a two way blend of compost and topsoil. Most different suppliers, landscape suppliers are going to be able to give you a couple different options for topsoil. We like to have that compost in there, gives us some good nutrients and sometimes people actually have a three way blend or a four way blend with like sand or sawdust. But this is just a two way blend with the compost which gives it that extra nutrients. What you can see us doing here is using a wheelbarrow and just double teaming to get it up the hill because we had to literally get in the back area of the lawn. There was no other access point besides going around. The side of the house is extremely steep and they had already installed fence posts as you can see in the background there, which wouldn't allow any sort of machines getting in the back there. So if you're getting a landscape job and you get a blank slate or you don't have other, you're not working on other contractors, like fencing. They had this house. I think they like the painting, the roofing, and all the rest of their moving in. It was tough to just work around them Sometimes. The biggest hassle on these landscape installs when they're redoing their entire landscape is just working around other contractors. There's definitely some ways we could have saved time on this job and made it a little easier than definitely. If we would have had a blower truck, it would have made it so much easier. A blower truck would blow in the mulch, blow in the soil. We wouldn't have to do it all by hand with the wheelbarrows. Or if we had like a mini skid steer or even a mini excavator, a ditch, which those would be really helpful, just moving the material.

You got enough down there, you think?

Yeah, I think we're done down here.

Brandon, do you think we should take a couple more wheelbarrows up top? I just don't see them wanting that small of an area. Let's say a couple more up there. I just don't have to bring more soil tomorrow.

Is there, like, two more wheelbarrows full, you think, in the trailer?

Okay.

Oh, perfect. You want to knock that down part of the bottom first, though?

No, I'm thinking that's our easiest spot.

Okay, let's do the hard one first. First, Roger. All right. So a couple of concerns I have with this job, and that is the slope you saw there When I was talking. The slope on that one area of the lawn is extremely steep. And when you put sod on that, there's a few things you want to make sure you do. Number one is make sure you checkerboard the sod install. So it actually kind of locks up in terms of don't go all in one direction and keep it all symmetrical, because you do want that sod. You do not want it sliding down the hill. And that's the big problem when you start having soil, and that's new, plus watering it all the time. So my number one concern was that slope. And what we ended up doing is using pins, like the little metal pins that you use on, like, landscape fabric. Punching that through the sod, it grips the netting that is baked into that, you know, built into that sod and keeps it on that slope. And the second thing is watering. It's extremely hot. We did not do 3, 4 inches worth of soil. So the importance of watering this lawn is extremely important. That's my biggest concern, because this client is extremely busy. They're moving in. They've had all this stuff happen. You got to water the lawn, and in this time of heat, if you don't, you're going to pay for it in the form of dead sod and parts that end up dying. I'm Mike Andes, landscape businesscourse.com. we'll see you tomorrow. Hey, everyone, Mike Andes here. Thank you so much for watching the video. Make sure you click down below where at Lawn Care Media, we're creating flyer templates just like these. You can make money mowing lawns, doing landscaping, and these flyers are going to help you do it. We'll see you in the next video.