Why I'll NEVER Hire Another Tradesperson

We have drainage problems in our front garden and in this video I am going to install some channel drains in an attempt to solve them. The channel drains will run from here to here where we have an entrance to a new drain that I recently dug up, I didn't film any of it but I have a video on soaker channels that I will leave a link to in the description box below. We are adding additional drainage here because some water accumulates when it rains mainly due to cars passing on the nearby road pushing a lot of rainwater into the garden.

First I'm going to have to cut some of this concrete to establish a straight line. I had already marked it using a chalk line and By the way, this concrete slope also needs to be redone, since the concrete completely failed. A professional did it a few years ago. Now it cost us a lot of money and the person responsible had to come and redo it, needless to say it caused us problems. A lot of stress and after waiting over a year we decided to cut our losses and do it ourselves. More on that later in the video, so it was much easier to cut this than it should have been with a chisel bit. installed on the SDS drill I can break everything I want to get rid of this tool is called mattic and it will be very useful in this project mainly because the soil under this concrete where I need to dig a big trench is very well compacted, right, let's talk.

Channel drains, they are available in different classifications A5, which is suitable for pedestrians with a weight limit of 1.5 tonnes, B125, which is suitable for 12.5 tonnes, and that is what I have here because they are suitable for things like driveways and then beyond that there's really heavy stuff. I also have one of these silk traps. I think it's called a sump unit and as you can see it's much deeper and the job of this is basically to collect. any silk or deis that can get into the drain and keep the silt and debris from getting into the soaking bowl, so once a year or so I can remove this rack from the top, take out the trash and throw it in the trash , as you can see.

I have already connected this to a 110mm drain pipe ready to connect to the soaker line. I also picked up a couple of end caps whose slot on the end looks like this. One of my channel drains came in with a big crack. That, considering this thing is supposed to have a capacity of up to 12.5 tons, worries me a little, but I guess the strength of these really comes from the concrete surrounding the drainage channel, but the damage on this only up to the final, the first of 200. thousand I think I can still get away with using this.

The recommendation is to have 100mm or 4 inches of concrete on both sides and under the channel drains which is where much of the resistance will come from, however I want to dig my trench to be 300mm or 1T wide and that It's because I want to create something that looks like this. It gives me room for some formwork so I can get a nice, crisp edge, then 100mm on one side and under the drains, but on the other. side I only want a couple of inches here and that's because later when the concrete slope of our driveway is redone that will completely support the other side so that's the plan and now it's time to dig out the worst part of this project and this was a It was a real struggle, none of my gardening tools cut the mustard so I had to use my SDS drill again to break up the soil.

I wanted to make sure the bottom of my trench was nice and square, so here I am using the Matic. Just to undercut the bottom corners my trench ended up being dug deeper than necessary, as you can see here it's around 320mm deep instead of the 250mm needed so it will be extra strong and I had more than it takes. enough materials for concrete. I found a long piece of 9mm plywood that I can use for the formwork. I simply broke it in half on the table saw and then screwed some drill bits into the back to get the length I needed.

A thicker plywood has been much better for this, but I'm using what I have available. I also cut some fillets out of some pieces of wood for the cape to go in and then I can hammer the fillets and secure the cape to them with screws and then I'm removing this temporary cover that I made just to cover a hole in the floor where the absorption entrance is the area where the SU unit will be. It must be excavated much deeper than the rest of the trench because it is 400 mm. tall and also needs 100mm of support around it so this hole ended up being just over 500mm deep and it looks like it should work so I went to get the cement mixer to mix my concrete.

I bought a ton of this stuff. This is sand with some 20 mil gravel and will be perfect for mixing with cement. Using a mixed ballast like this will save me a lot of time. I also picked up five bags of cement which should be enough. Here I am drilling. I make a couple of holes in the concrete path at the end of the trench and am adding a couple of long concrete screws but leaving them sticking out a couple of inches, this is probably not necessary to be honest but I thought about it. I provide some mechanical strength to help join the two slabs together.

I put some water in the mixer and then add three buckets of ballast, then a bucket of cement and I'm holding my breath because of all that nasty cement dust in the air and then a final bucket of ballast, so I'm using a 4:1 mix here. You could get a similar mix using three parts 20 mil gravel, two parts sharp sand and one part cement and then I can add water until it looks good and to me. This looks wet enough to flow throughout the spaces, but not too wet. I'm going to install the sump part first and first I'm going to put some concrete in the hole to set it and I can remove this bag that I put in. around the entrance to prevent debris from entering.

I'm lubricating the end of the tube with a little silicone grease and then I can move it into place, which actually took a while as these fittings can be difficult to assemble. I have more than enough. they drop over this pipe which is good, canal drains don't need to be fitted with a drop, they can be installed horizontally as it doesn't matter if there is water in them, but I am going to install them with a very slight drop. The final drain can be cut to size to fit inside and prevent concrete from flowing into the drain.

I simply wedged one of the end caps off the chamber. One problem I had was that the weight of the concrete was starting to lift the canal drains. higher than I wanted so I just applied some weights on top to clear the mixer. I add a couple of bricks and a little water and then I can start testing the concrete. I really would have liked to leave a couple. of hours before doing this, but it was getting late so I did the best I could with it wet like this, so it's been a couple of days, the concrete should be dry by now, let's find out it's not the neatest and, In hindsight, I really should have bought a TR edging just to go around the corner, but this will be fine and more than strong enough, so we focused on our concrete slope nightmare.

The first job was to fit a reclaimed steel box section which I primed and painted gloss black and bought some end caps. I had already pre-drilled some countersunk holes in the steel and here I'm just drilling into the concrete and I'll fit these pieces together using some concrete. screws The reason I'm installing this is because the old concrete that the professionals laid had nothing to support when it was laid, so over time it collapsed, cracked and broke, and this time I want a clean screed that out Sure we were able to put the concrete up this is about a 5 and 1/2 met span I think I had to do this in two pitches with that done we had to break up all the old concrete and I want to thank my uncle for helping me with that, It took me almost a whole day and it was quite hard work to break it down and clean it all up, then I started to close everything up, so here for example I used a roof batten with some stakes behind it, in other places I just used some pieces of roofing material. pine or sheets that I could get my hands on and then lay the new concrete, which was done on a new day when the professional was due to come back to do this, he basically called me that day and at this point I just decided that I needed to do this, so I asked for help and thank you very much to my brother and my dad for helping me here.

This was

another

long day of hard work. Our goal was to get the concrete about 2 inches thick on the top and bottom. but in the middle it probably ended up closer to 3 or 4 inches. We had to place it in a U shape because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to get to the middle section. It actually looked pretty good once it was tred, but the old concrete had a tred finish and was very slippery and dangerous when frozen, so we wanted to give a rough texture to the new concrete and the only way to figure out how to do that was to pass a broom on him, this would definitely have worked.

Better if we could have left it longer to fire, but obviously we wouldn't have been able to get to the center section. A manipulated finish would have been better and would have leveled everything out nicely, but we tried it and it just went that way. Working with access was difficult on the one hand, and to be honest, it was very complicated. I didn't really like the way it looked when I ran the broom over it. It was simply the best option we had, and it also created a lot of loose space. but we were hoping that once this was dry we could clean up the loose bits pretty easily in the end.

I did a walk around all the edges just to give it a little more finished look and then we left the concrete alone for a couple. of days to begin healing, unfortunately this was one of those jobs that were

never

going to be perfect. My brother and I have limited experience in this type of work. My dad shouldn't even be lifting 50-pound bags of cement at his age. He's honest, but he did an amazing job loading the mixers for us, and at this point it probably sounds like I'm just making excuses, but we also didn't have enough material to complete the job, which again depended on the guy he was referring to. do the job as we wanted the slope to be thicker in the middle to soften the slope of the slope, so it was a job that was really about compromises and I'm sure that people who have been watching my channel for a time I can feel how frustrated and fed up I am with this whole situation and I think the lesson that I have learned over the years not only on this project, but if you look back on the roofing project we had a while ago, where we had a similar situation of disappointment although they apologized and fixed it so no hard feelings even to the guys we paid to replace our gutters and fascia boards who didn't even bother to connect the downspouts to the pipe in the ground and That wasn't the only one either because I've recently realized that this one isn't correct either.

Anyway, the lesson is that perhaps some tradesmen may be more skilled or knowledgeable than the average home or DIY owner, but it is unlikely that they will be. I'm going to care about the job as much as you do and that's why from now on I will always choose to DIY instead of hiring someone else. Of course, there are some amazing people at Trad and I'm lucky to know some amazing ones. Me, like Robin Clev for example who did the wood work for our new roof or the plumber or plasterer we've been using for the last few years, those people are like gold dust, so even though the slope of our driveway it may not be perfect, it's done and sometimes That's enough, hopefully it won't fall apart this time.

This area will need to be stooped to the drain to ensure the concrete is fully supported and strong, but before doing so I couldn't resist checking the sump unit. The thing was picking up debris from the driveway and it looks like it's doing a good job, so then on the eerie side I'm using

another

4 to 1 mix off camera. I also prepped the edge of the concrete just to reduce the suction of the new concrete that I'm laying here and a little bit of masking tape helped me keep my grills mostly clean and you'll see I also added this final detail here with concrete.

I would love to say that was the entire job, but no, there is more to do. All the gravel here was a real mess and the ground level here is also too high so there is still more digging to do and then I spent several hours separating all the dirt from the gravel and then washing the gravel. I made a short video about broken gravel. truck buckets recently, which I know resonated with people because it got over 3 million views across all platforms and someone got in touch to ask if they could send me some oftheir truck buckets with reinforced, unbreakable handles that I have been using throughout this project and these are a world apart from these that just don't last 5 minutes and these aren't that much more expensive either.

They even sent me a video of two Vans playing tug of war with the handles on these, so I'll leave a link to those. in the description box if you would like to see them and I believe this is an affiliate thing so I may earn a small commission on any purchases, thank you and finally the satisfying part of putting all the clean gravel back into place as well that here it is. If we don't look too closely there are marks and imperfections but it's obviously infinitely better than what we had before and in terms of drainage everything seems to be working well, although we haven't had a very heavy downpour yet, thanks for looking.