hi everybody and welcome to another edition of home renovation with carrie it's now the middle of october and i haven't done much else inside the house because i've been busy doing other things but we have done our front yard real landscaping we have dug out our basement and foundation to stop the leaks in the water coming in so i thought to give you a few tips on things like that that i learned and put in a new driveway so let me start with the basement the foundation of this house is built like a bank barn so on this corner of front of the house we had to have the whole foundation dug out all the way down to the bottom and he's home early so anyway we had to dig this all out and when they dug it all out they found that this whole side of the foundation was just packed with clay dirt and at the bottom they had put in a french drain well the french drain was the wrong kind of pipe it was completely collapsed so i had seepage and effervescence on my walls down in the basement and this is unfortunate but this had to be done and get out anyways with the guys put in which was great was they put out this little thing right here which is is something they can come in and what do they call they're called cleaning out ports and they can go down in there and they can make sure that the pipe hasn't collapsed and get any se that's built up in the pipes so they make sure i don't ever have leaking basement again but the thing about this is i didn't i didn't know much about basements and fifty percent of the air that we breathe on our first floor comes from the basement and that's why you don't want to be breathing in mold spores and bacteria that build up down there because your foundation is made from concrete which is poorest and it absorbs get this ten to fifteen gallons of water vapor day a day so your foundation walls of your house are responsible for eighty percent of them waste your buildup in your home and that leads to mold bacteria and it tracks bugs and i'm sure you girls remember those thousand lay bugs this h so many of them they were on the walls every night gross so unfortunate but this was a good thing we did and and that slowed us down on doing the landscaping and everything so once i got done with that though we moved on to designing the yard when we moved in here let's talk about the concrete the concrete was buckled at the driveway because there were no drains and you can see that the house kind of sits down so all the water was draining towards the garage and towards the middle part of the yard and just soaking it and it gets underneath the concrete and it actually went ahead and buckled it so we needed a new driveway but we didn't like the look of it for the house we were would like to we wanted to design something new to kind of change the look of the front of the house so we started sketching up a couple of ideas and this was the idea we came up with and we did the driveway first now i didn't want  new concrete because i didn't want the real gray look i didn't think the real gray looking to look good with the house i wanted the exposed aggregate now exposed aggregate gives a natural look i thought the natural look went really well with the roof color and the brick color it comes in a variety of colors you don't have to get these kind of colors but it's very low maintenance you just have to seal it every three to five years it's safer than regular concrete because it's skid resistant because of the different types and textures of stones and it hides marks and stains so for all of those reasons we went ahead and put in exposed aggregate and i think it's awesome can you imagine this with the big bright shiny white gray concrete i think it would just think it would ruin the whole look so after we did that then we started designing our plan  for hiding the slope and when you look at it from here you can't really tell we'll have to go to another angle to see where that slope is hidden and then we hid all of the runoff and drains in the rocks we put runoffs underneath them so it'll wrap and run around the house then i had nice keeping done and i kind of don't want to tell you did my nights caving because i love him and he's so busy now that i can barely get him to come over now but if you can see the house lit up at night it's awesome and it only takes one hundred and twenty five watts of power and it lights up my whole house and these two boyer's out here are really pretty they have a light that shoots up through minute makes a beautiful little you can see kind of right there how they look you can see the design very lovely at night here you go you can kind of see as we walk forward here the pitch of the landscape in the front of the house starts heading downward and we saw the water i would come out here when it w poor rain really hard and i could see it rushing right where these rocks are so we put a slope in there so that it would literally the water comes running off the here and it's caught right here in this catch basin and goes down and into the drain around the house it's also hooked up in here and goes around to the side of the house and i'll show you i have like a pipe coming right out of there's a pipe right there a white one coming right there into the rocks and so this all water falls down and comes out and goes on down the yard now turn around here and look at this so this is where the big step down was and we had to think long and hard about this hard scape about how we were going to make this slope look at track to give to us looking outside of the house coming out of our front door and look at tracked it from the street so we came up with a couple of drawings and and then came up with a couple more and we went right back to our first drawing and that was to make this little rock garden right here so we went over to federici we picked out these big boulders what a trip that places oh my gosh these massive trucks in and out with these huge boulders in there and made that a little planner there made this a little rock garden and then the light shine on it at night and it's really nice so much water comes flowing down here in these hard rains that we get here so we put another drain right there to hook up move the water around the house and out away from the foundation it works primo when we first moved in this was a pond out here it would just pool with water because the dirt here is so it has no air in it it's just like brick clay so my my lawn didn't come in as good as i wanted it to because we did it in the heat of the summer because we had the labor crew ready at the time and sometimes on big projects like this you just have to go with what you have because you have to have plan b plan c and sometimes d because projects don't always go as planned but the grass is pretty good but i am going to have to supplement it a little bit and probably  d again this fall get ready to do that but other than that the night scaping is awesome my electrician added some blue lenses everything is l e d like i said all of these lights that you see add up to one one hundred twenty five wobble that that's just incredible on some of the spot lights he put a blue lens cover on them so on  certain pines that have a little bit of blue and him they it attaches to the green color and it makes them just look even crisper and more green really an awesome technique to do as far as the night ski being we have you know the night scaping that i've talked about those are the up lights the walkway the cross past the directional not too much light it's real soft it comes on at dark and then it goes off around one in the morning about one in the morning then so it's not totally pitch dark these have a sensor i have one light here and one light on each side of the house that come on once the night scaping goes off just to give me a little bit of light if i had to jump up and maybe see if a window of fallen out of the house or something you know so  that's what happens here with this with the with the light of the lights that my great guy did what i want to talk to you guys though about some of the trees i am i got most of my plants and everything i got in from all over i went to lowe's home depot wal mart but i also want to over to mcmurtry nursery which is so close and this guy knows so much about plants it was it was an awesome knowledgeable experience because normally i try to get a native species because you're if you get a native species you're going to have less disease less problems all of it just makes your life easier but i went over there and i saw these two pine trees that are right here and they are there's something called the sicilian fur and they are native to lebanon syria and turkey and these things are so old like i mean they're like some of the oldest trees around these are not grafted trees most everything you buy now is a landscaper it's got a graft mark on it where they put it on so little grow bigger and faster this is this is these are not their actual true trees and i just fell in love with the way they looked they have these really beautiful little pine cones that come out so if you're interested in anything different off the beaten path and i want to check out mcmurray nursery because he really does have some unique things that i mean i fell in love with it specially from doing landscaping so i fell in love with the look of this plant it's called  hallie and that translate from japanese as five colors so the new leaves to merge red and then they turn green and they kind of look pink and creamy and i love it look at that it is awesome so i got it and i think the dears don't like it i also tried to do that a lot here too is get anything the deer would need because it's just a hassle but this is a nice little specimen i could only find one and i think i found sugar run nursery so maybe they're in high demand the night scaping is all by unique lighting home lighting and it is a great company because they have like i'm a big one for warranties and companies that stand behind their worn and this company does they electricians love it it's it's good stuff so anyway that's where the transformers are this is were my electrician hooks everything together that does this planter so those are around in the planter but you don't see him too much that's a sunken up light for my i think this is a japanese maple but i can't remember if it's an autumn moon full moon maple i got a couple of different maples and i got those from  mcmurray nursery too because they were unusual and ones you don't see that much in the deer don't like him who would have thought ok so when i was at mcmurray nursery i saw this little i thought it was kind of like a white pine i didn't know what it was but again this is a horse hort sman silber lot korean for any of you landscape or plant affection auto's this guy horseman is a man who came from somewhere and he started in somewhere utah or seattle and he realized how many trees that were endangered and stephanie started growing them on this big farm and to get trees from him is like a big deal of you got him from port all that's awesome so when i saw this one the guy mcmurry told me again he goes this thing is a specimen it's beautiful you won't find him anywhere and he's right it has these really large show we combed but it just has this pretty white look it's tolerant to more he taller and to he anyways it's an awesome tree i loved i loved the look of it and so i went ahead and bought another tree that wasn't native but  was not a grafted tree and if you guys are into it check out that horseman's guy because he's got quite an interesting story he died not too long ago and people like hoarding hoarding histories i think is still plenty just depends on what you're into so another big consideration when you're planning doing your landscaping is the proximity to concrete side of your house a lot of people just want to receive profess growing tree and they don't think about that its roots are possibly going underneath the house and cracking your foundation or looking for your water pipes and strangling them so i picked this one close proximity to the concrete this is a slow growing tree it'll only end up being ten feet tall and six feet wide but that'll take like ten years so it was perfect for this spot because that'll be a long time and if you had to you could always make this a little bigger but that's something i really want people to think about when you're planning your landscaping is how big this tree going to get and look on the top ten concrete cracker list because a lot of the trees around here are big concrete crackers so silver maple and they grow really fast they're really big and they're all around here and you're going to have problems with them if you plan to close to your house so that's about it for now and hopefully i can get the inside of the