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.