Last April, my kids and I put in a 39-foot French drain to divert water away from the flower bed behind the cabana, which flooded every time it rained and then stayed much too wet for the yuccas I had planted the previous fall. Plus, the back part of the concrete under the cabana would have an inch of standing water on it after heavy rains, and that was not good for the concrete.
The French drain took us about 20 hours over a period of nine days to complete, but it only cost me $140 and that included buying a shovel, a four-foot level (a must-have for this project), and a 25-foot tape measure. It was a lot of hard work, but it was worth it in the end. We have not had any flooding in that area since we put in the French drain.
We recently hired a company to build a large metal building beside our house. The front part of this building is a two-car garage, while the back contains a workshop and space for our hobbies. My new husband has spent the last two and a half weeks transforming that space into a home gym, which will also house his drum set and some extra furniture that we will use for storage and display. He will finish up that project in the next week or so, and then I will share the photos I have taken while he worked. Here is a sneak peak of the time I helped him by holding a wall.
In the process of moving dirt and pouring the slab for the new building, the slope of that part of the yard caused some drainage issues. We did not want water to sit around the new slab and cause problems, so we knew we would have to divert the water in some way. I thought about creating a swale that would slope towards the back of the building and drain into the existing swale that goes through our backyard. However, after I realized the swale did not extend that far and that the yard did not slope the right direction, I knew we would have to dig another trench for a French drain.
Because I was a single mom for a few years and dug the last French drain mostly by myself, I started digging while my husband worked inside the building, but he soon joined me, and we were able to complete most of the digging that first day. Fortunately, there are no sprinkler pipes in this part of the yard, but our lateral lines for our septic system are in the back of the yard. Hubs found the single pipe leading to those lines without damaging it, but it was right in the way of the end of the trench. After digging for a few hours, we stopped and let it rain the next day to see how the water flowed.
The trench worked well, and we had no standing water next to the building after we received a half-inch of rain. I knew we would have to do something to divert water from where the downspout emptied near the front corner of the building, but that would have to wait until the next weekend. At some point this summer, we will have grass in this area, but for now we have a makeshift walkway to the side door for muddy days.
I decided that I would try to make a very shallow swale to guide the water from Fred the gargoyle (Big Sis named him) over to the trench. This was a lot of work, and it was hard to see the fruit of my labor because it was so shallow, but I took photos anyway.
I also dug out a wider area at the mouth of the trench. The septic tanks are located in this area, so we were limited on how far our trench could go, but I wanted all of the water to drain into the trench. I am very detail-oriented and a bit of a perfectionist, so I worked on this area by myself for an hour or more.
After we laid the drain pipe out, I realized we would have to dig more dirt out of the trench. It was deep enough for the pipe, but we also needed to put gravel above and below the pipe, so we both started digging again. We ended up digging the trench under the pipe to our lateral lines to allow the drain pipe to continue sloping away from the yard. I mentioned earlier that a level is necessary for this type of project. Every few feet that we dug, I used the level to check the slope. We often had to dig deeper to keep the trench sloping away from the septic tanks.
We were expecting rain on March 22nd, so my husband and my former father-in-law went to get half a yard of gravel early that morning. We spread a layer of gravel along the bottom of the trench. Then we placed a weed barrier in the trench. We put the drain pipe on top of the weed barrier and then filled the trench with gravel, leaving about an inch above the gravel to be covered with soil. Working together, we completed this step of the process in less than an hour. I had just started putting soil on top of the gravel when I remembered to take photos.
We finished covering the gravel with dirt and tried to smooth out the dirt around the trench. We decided to wrap the mouth of the drain pipe with the weed barrier and pile gravel in front of that to prevent dirt from clogging the drain. I added some river rocks to the area in front of that to make it look pretty, and my hubby put the leftover gravel in the area just outside the gate and also at the opposite end of our driveway.
Now we were waiting for the rains to come to see how our French drain worked. I went outside that afternoon while it was raining to see how the water was flowing. My shallow swale was finally visible! The water was standing near the mouth of the drain, but an hour later when it was no longer raining, the water was gone, so we believe our French drain is a success.
We spent a total of $94 on this project, which included 50 feet of weed barrier, 50 feet of perforated drain pipe, and half a yard of one-inch gravel. I have no idea how much it would have cost to pay someone else to put in a French drain, but I know we saved hundreds of dollars by doing it ourselves.
If you have not heard about Frank the Christmas Gargoyle, you should go to his page on Facebook and catch up on his holiday shenanigans. This silly gargoyle brought so much joy to thousands of people during a difficult holiday season. After our gutters were installed, we knew we would need something at the bottom to divert the water away from the building and to keep heavy rains from washing out the dirt below the downspout. I did some research and found out that gargoyles were originally installed on buildings to do just that, so I bought Fred, and he makes me smile.
Chronicling Chaos 