Landscape, Construction Management Disaster turns Into a Mud/ LandSlide

this job started out simply enough but turned into one hot mess pretty quickly when the customer started to make changes on the project during the job that were in the original scope of work what we're gonna be talking about today are change orders messy jobs and while you as contractors and what you as customers should expect and look out for so let's analyze today's job was the epitome of easy outside of this customers back door he just had this nasty wavy slope gone down no flat yard space all we had to do was import maybe three four hundred cubic yards of soil create a gentle pitch off from his back door to be able to shed water down and to maximize his flat yard space we were then going to have a different change in the angle and at this point right here this was going to change to a 20 degree slope this 20 degree slope is a maintainable surface he can mow it you can easily establish vegetation it's no big deal we literally had the project done I like this slope so you've created that basically when you consider this a two to one Tim you don't have it perfectly flat up here because we need water to run off of course but it looks good I don't see where you need a whole lot more dirt so John how many ton you like a quad axle hauls 18 depending depending on on the frame style and how are you gonna relate that to a joke about your wife she can't go down a nine-ton road neither can they there was always a joke about your ex-wife in there somewhere and the customer makes a change he wanted the backyard space to be virtually flat which would stiffen up this 20 degree slope to a 40 degree slope now you can establish vegetation on a 40 degree slope but it's a much bigger challenge job has changed considerably since we've started it at the customer's request the grades that we had coming up like this and now been extended out and brought to a more vertical drop the reason we don't recommend doing that can't maintain it it's gonna be difficult to maintain without a retaining wall think vegetation will grow on that slope this is what he wanted now what we were originally planning on doing yeah you got it done at one point Dania where I thought yeah you tell them that this morning what happened was nine months after this project was done the customer failed to establish vegetation successfully on this 40 degree slope nine inches of rain in three separate days created a mudslide for this customer at this forty degree pitch this nine inch rain storm started to peel this slope like an onion and when it did that it brought it all down into two neighbors backyards a customer called me up he confronted me on this project he then said how come you let me do this want to back this up at that point when I had completed the job and created it the way that I felt comfortable with he not only insisted that it be changed but he actually was considering canceling the entire project after it was already done if I didn't make the changes as he requested canceling the entire project is code for not only was he not going to pay us he was going to ask us to remove all of the soil and undo all of the work we had already accomplished on his job unless we made the changes as he had outlined I reminded this customer that I had told him that this was not in the original design had concerns with this entire redesign it didn't make a difference at that point I had a mad customer a mudslide on my hands and I had a reputation to uphold so I went out with an excavator and a skid loader and for three days I worked on rebuilding his bank for $0 I wasn't about to hang this customer out to dry even though this wasn't my design this wasn't my idea and this isn't what I wanted to originally install if we got another nine inch rainfall there was nothing to keep that slope from turning back into a mudslide so changes have had to be made to make the customers design even feasibly work we needed to install a very creative drainage system what we're putting in our chimney drains vertical drains that go into the bank they're gonna collect the water and funnel it out through think of it like a modified geo pier so this allows the water as it to catch and drain out now we're putting these in one there another one there another one there another one there and the fifth one is actually already installed right there the toe of the hill we're putting in four-foot boulders yokes is standing next to him he's in front of them actually a little bit those I'd say are probably what do you think Tim goes between a half four foot roughly somewhere along that and that's more that's actually less for drainage and more just structurally to allow us to alter the pitch of this hill so that we can get a slider angle easier maintenance for the customer and we installed a horizontal drainage system behind those Boulder retaining wall so as the water was coming through the hill it would hit that drainage system and give it an outlet but here's the problem the customer had maxed out their budget on the initial design of this project so now I have a design that has already proven to fail so what do you do well I proposed to this customer that I'll make the changes necessary to hopefully stabilize this bank at cost which means customer pays the same rates that I am the problem is we lost two weeks out of the busiest part of our seasons to do a redesign on a project that we should have never agreed to do in the first place I want to hear from you guys what is your story with change orders this one was a landscaping mess that turned to just kept getting worse by the minute you know I'd love to say and customers sometimes you need to rely on the and the experience of the contractor you're working with whether the change order you want is in your best benefit or not but the problem is a lot of times the contractors don't think of the change orders in the customers best interest they think of the change order in their own best interest and that's where their gets to be a real conflict when I say that what I mean is a lot of times a contractor will look at a change order and they'll go well am I gonna make money off from it or do I have something better to do somewhere else and that's the wrong thing to do because this is something that's going to impact that customer forever so I can't you know all consiousness say on this video that you guys should solely rely on the contractors opinion because a lot of times the contractors opinions not in the customers best interest but a lot of times the customers what they want isn't in their own best interest it's actually counterintuitive it's gonna turn what could be a successful project into aha mess well there's like this tipping point where it's gotta be a teamwork approach the customer has got to believe in the contractor and the contractors gotta have the customers best interest in mind even if that's saying no to the customer hopefully you won't have a hot mess like I had and customers don't make fricken change orders that you don't know anything about Oh [Music]

Channel: Stanley "Dirt Monkey" Genadek

Views: 878,860

Rating: 4.7431803 out of 5

Keywords: landscaping, landscape, construction, construction disasters, construction fail, construction site, landscaping projects, construction accidents caught on tape, contractor, contractor training, retaining wall, construction training, DIY, How to, how to choose a contractor, mudslide caught on camera, landslide, Mudslide, landscape ideas, landslide disaster, landslide caught on camera, construction management, construction management course, construction management training

Id: JVfD3ZGMw50

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2016