If you've got an
area of grass that just won't grow due to shade,
trees, or a trampoline, or even a small patch of lawn
that's hardly worth getting the lawn mower out for, then
installing some artificial lawn could be just the thing for you. It's low-maintenance,
and actually looks great. In fact, these days you can
hardly tell it's not real. I'll show you how to get
the job done easy as. Now just before
we crack into it, you might want to check
with your local council because there are
a few regulations that you may need
to comply with. Now, we want to remove
about 60 to 80 millimeters of our organic matter here. Basically, we want to get
down to something firm. Dig out all the
areas of your lawn that you're going to cover. OK. I'm just about down
at my correct depth. Got a little bit
more to take out. Now, pretty lucky here. We've actually struck sand. Now this has been compacted
really nice and tight. So the good thing about
having a sand as a substrate is, it's really free draining. Now if you've got a lawn
that tends to flood, or is a little bit
boggy, you might want to think about
putting in a drain coil. Now the people of this
house have already installed a drain coil
with a filter sock, leading up to our cesspit. Now as you can see
in the cesspit, we've got a drain coil
coming across the lawn with a filtered sock
around it into our cesspit. Now you can do all this
work with the drain coil side of things with
a filter sock on it and your cesspit yourself. However, from the cesspit
to your storm water, you're going to need to
get a drain layer involved. When you've finished digging
out, rake your lawn as even and level as you can. Now in order for our lawn
to have a nice, clean edge to finish up against, we would
need to have a garden border. Now we're pretty lucky. In this situation, there's
already one installed. But if you want to
learn how to do it, check out a couple of our
garden border videos online. I've dug down 80 millimeters. Now I'm going to finish my lawn
about 10 to 15 millimeters down from the top of our
pavers and our decking. Now I've got our Gap
20 placed in here. I'm going to spread
that out so it's about 50 millimeters thick. I'm then going to put
a compacter on it, and that'll take it down
to about 40 millimeters. Next, I'm going to
spread out my Gap 7. Now, I want about 30
millimeters of that. And I'm going to level
that out and compact it so I'm going to finish off with
a beautiful nice level lawn. Now here's a great
little tip for you. I've got some PVC pipe and
I've got a 30 mil PVC pipe. I've just laid that straight
on top of my base course. And I'm going to use a
level to screed across. You could use a flat bit
of timber if you like. And then we're just going to
sit that on top of our PVC pipe and screed our fines out. That way, I'm sure to get
a perfectly flat finish. Next, carefully
lift out the pipe. Then fill the gaps and level
off the top with the screed. And once again,
compact this down. OK, just to finish up,
I'm just taking off any little loose bits
that are left on the top. And then we'll just
sweep those away. And then we're ready to start
measuring out for our lawn. Now artificial lawn
has come a long way. We'll start it off with our
7 millimeter artificial lawn right up to our 35 millimeter,
and then about a 20 millimeter lawn. So the great thing about
this, it's perforated. So there are holes in it. That is so the water can
drain all the way through. And the good thing
about these two options here, it's lots of
different blends in there so it looks exactly
like real lawn. Now with this one here, it's
really nice and lush and thick. So today, that's the
one we're going to lay. The next thing I'm going
to do is measure the lawn and make a plan of the area. This should give me the
total size of my lawn so I know exactly how much
artificial lawn to buy. Now there's a couple
of different ways I could roll this out,
either from left to right or front to back. The reason I've gone
from left to right is because when I'm
standing inside the house and looking out, we're least
likely to see any joints. Now I've got a factory
edge on the edge of my row so I've butted that hard
up against that deck. So we don't need
to overhang that. But my garden edging,
it's stone borders. So they're a little
bit in and out. So I'm just going
to overhang that and we'll chop that off later. So I'm going to continue to
roll this all the way out. And then we'll come back and
chop out for these pavers a little bit later. Now there's quite an
important little tip I need to tell you before we get
onto the taping of the seams. So underneath the mat,
we've got all the stitching that's about half an inch apart
or about 12, 13 millimeters. So what we want to
do is replicate that. So in between each one of
those is about 12 millimeters. On the edge of my
mat, my cutline is hard up against
our stitching. On this side here,
I want to make sure it's round about the
same sort of distance away. Round about 10 to
13 millimeters, something like that. So when these go
together, we're going to get exactly the
same even finish. We don't want two big
pieces of mat butting up. Otherwise, you may
see a black line. Now when you are
rolling out your lawn, you just want to
make sure that you start all the rolls all from
the same direction go out. Because believe it or not, there
is actually a grain to this, and we want to make
sure that that matches. OK, the next thing
we're going to do is tape the seams together. So to do that,
I've opened this up and I've just put a light
scratch line in between where that joint was. Now I've pre-cut my
length of my tape and we're just going
to roll that out right in the middle on that line. Now just before we peel
off the back of the tape, we just want to make sure
that the back of our turf is actually nice and clean. We've given that a dust down. So what we're
going to do is just make sure we get the
two seams of the turf fitting nice and snug together. And we want to make sure
that none of the strands are actually going
into the tape. Everything is sticking out Righty, oh. It's now time to
pin our lawn down. There's a couple of different
ways I could go about this. I can either use a 150 mil
or a 6 inch galvanized nail with a flat head on it. Or I can use a weed mat staple. Now if you do decide to
use your weed mat staple, there are a couple of
little tips when doing that. You just want to make sure
when you're puncturing it through your mat, that
you don't actually trap any of the grass underneath it. So otherwise, you will
see the top of it. So what we're going to do-- I'm going to use the
6 inch galvi nail. And I'm just going to come
in about 60 millimeters in from the edge of my border. And then I'm going to put them
about every 200 millimeters. So what I'm going to look
for is a nice clear bit of the under mat. [HAMMERING] Now if you're in
the situation where you feel that you need
to stretch your mat out to get a few wrinkles
out of it, you can actually put your
nail in on quite an angle and then pull it over. And that's going to
stretch it for you. But I've got this laid
really nice and tight. So basically, I'm just going
to put it straight down. [HAMMERING] Now just make sure
that that head does not get any of the grass
trapped underneath it. And that just
disappears like that. I've also put a nail
down in the middle of every square meter of lawn. OK, now that I've
pinned it down, I'm just trimming
the outside edges. In this particular
situation, our bricks are a little bit in and out. So got to be quite careful,
and a good way to do that is by using one of these
extendable snap-off blades. Make sure it's
really, really sharp. You'll probably go
through a few of them because you do cut
through stones, and you are up against
your block work. You might want to change these
probably every 10 minutes or so. So basically, you just want
to get it nice and tight. Trim it off, and if you
feel like it's bubbling up a little bit, you
can just pin it down with your 6 inch
nail or your staple. If you do have a paver that
you need to cut around, basically all I'm
doing here is I'm finding the edge of my paver. And then I'm just going to drop
my knife and cut up against it. And I'm going to use the edge of
the paver like a straight edge. And I'm just going to follow
the line of that paver with a really nice,
sharp blade and just kind of follow that line along. You just want to take
your time, obviously, because you don't want
to overshoot your mark. Just make sure that you're
not going past your paver. If you feel like you're not that
confident on doing it this way, you could actually cut a hole
in the middle of your paver and the grass here. So that's going to
expose it, and you'll be able to see a little bit
more of where the edges are. [CUTTING] OK. So now, all I have
to do is just pin that around so I'll probably
pin that maybe every 100 millimeters around that because
this is a high foot traffic area. Now if you had a tree in
the middle of the lawn, you'd pretty much do
exactly the same thing. You could either put a
border around the tree. If you've got a steel
ring, you'd just use that to cut around as well. Now brush the lawn
to lift the strands. OK, there's only a couple of
last steps we've got to do. This one here is
throwing out some sand. Basically, I've got some
really nice fine sand here, and it's kiln dried. The reason I'm using this
is because it's going to throw out a lot easier. It's not going to clump. The reason we've
put the sand down, there's a couple of
different reasons. One is it's going to actually
help weight down our turf. Two, it's also going to stop any
organic matter from blocking up the holes so the
water can run through. And three, also it
helps the blades of the turf stand upright. So basically, we just want to
throw this out quite lightly. And then we're just
going to brush it in. [BRUSHING] Check it out. You wouldn't know that
that's not real grass. And now, you can get rid
of the old lawn mower.
