Well, Good Afternoon.

Backyard Brian here.

I’ve got Logan Peters here with me. I thought it’d be fun just to talk with him as a first time home buyer about his home and go over some of the things he’s wanting to do.

The first thing you will see behind us here is a big pile of shingles. We’ve got a brand new roof ready to replace the 30-year roof, which needed to be done as soon as we bought the house. We’re excited to get that done.

So he’s going to do this with a buddy and they’ll have some fun with that. I’ve done a few roofs that will work for this scenario. As you can see up on the roof, he’s got a three tab. That’s probably about a 25-year old roof up there. How old is the house?

This is a dimensional shingle, and you’ll see that it’s made a little bit differently. These are 30-year roofs and many times they last a lot longer than that. This is a gaf, timberline. Great product. All right, so we’re going to walk around here a little bit and you can see as you go.

As we were talking earlier, there’s one issue here in the front of the house that you were a little bit concerned about, so I got a bigger issue here in the front with the grade tilting back towards the house. Brian’s expertise is probably a lot better than mine, but I know I’m going to have to change that grade to come away from the house a little bit.

What you’ve got here is the yard sloping back toward the house, and code on something like this requires you to have one-inch per foot of fall for six feet away from the house. So, there should be six inches of fall coming away from the house. He probably has six inches going the other way. He doesn’t have a lot of space between the siding there to fill up, so he can raise it some. One other thing that I see right here is you’ve got an air vent to your space. You’ll want to put a well around that, when you bring it right up and may need to lower this section of the art a little bit to get enough fall because the water’s going to want to pool here. And so a little bit of landscaping work to do here. We’re going to walk into the backyard. I’m excited about this because this is a blank slate back here, and he’s got some good ideas.

The first thing that I want to talk about a little bit is this unfinished deck that we’re going to need to certainly pressure wash good. It also needs to be treated. It hasn’t been treated to what we can see since it’s been built. I know that’s one of Brian’s specialties. A weather staining finish will go a long ways with this deck and freshen it up.

One other thing I’m seeing here is that these posts were notched around this corner, which weakens the post. So maybe adding a 2×4 here with a bevel on top constraint in this corner will help. Even on the other posts as well, because you don’t want the rail weakening over time.

That’s one thing that I see on this deck. Otherwise, it’s a little weathered and in pretty decent shape for a deck of this age. There’s an addition on the back of this house that we can see here that was added on a few years ago. We also noticed that it really needs some skirting around the outside of the house here.This will prevent any type of barment from getting under there and a few other things that have been discussed. And part of what we’ll see up here is that you’ve got exposed paper on the installation that has nothing covering it.

There’re one of two solutions to this. One, is to put plywood or something up underneath there to cover it, but when you do that, you still get cold air blowing up underneath the house, which affects your energy efficiency. However, if you add some skirting around the outside that keeps the air from going under there it’ll keep cats and dogs and other stuff out and make it function pretty much like a, like a crawlspace. There’s a couple of different ways to do that. I’ll actually put some pictures in the comments when we get done of some skirting that can work.

Let’s talk about this lack of grass we have here in the backyard. He has mentioned how it’s a blank slate, which is a lot of what you see here. The grass is something that we certainly want to tackle out of the gate going into spring. I’m not an expert landscaper by any means, so I won’t pretend to be. However, one of the things I see here is that this has gotten compacted, down, probably by traffic. In order to get it to grow grass, you’re going to have to loosen it up pretty good, which is more than just scratching the surface. If you can add some peat moss or compost (or something like that) to the surface, that will help too. Then make sure you’ve got a shade-tolerant grass seed because you do have some pretty good-sized trees here that are affecting this area.

I see you’ve got a fire pit over here. It looks like it’s set up for a little bit of cleanup from the previous owners. That’ll be a nice spot to gather here in the backyard. You’ve also got a shed and fence around here.

What are some of your dreams; things that you would like to do with this backdoor? Like, how do you envision using it? What would you like to see happen back here?

Oh, lots of cookouts and Easter egg hunts since we’re at Easter weekend. We’ll look forward to having a few of those in the next few years.

That’s cool. I know you’ve got friends whom you’d like to hang out with, so I think this will be a good spot. We certainly want to make it an entertainment space, so we’ve got some work to do there. We’ll check back in a little bit later, and you’ve got some nice trees here too. That’ll help give some shade to the backyard. Are there any other questions that you have about this backyard that we can look into now. What else do you see?

Let’s say there are a few places that the siding on the shed here has taken a beating, so that is it gets brittle over vinyl. You may want to consider replacing the siding on the shed at some point. I also see that this electrical box here has pulled away, and so you want to just make sure that that wire is not frayed in behind there. It’s probably OK. Although that would be worth checking out.

You’ve got a great blank slate, and I hope you guys have a lot of fun.

Anyway, hope everyone has a great Easter weekend! I’m so grateful for all of our friends and family.

Everyone have a great weekend! We’ll talk to you later. See Ya. Thanks.