Floods & French Drains
Problem: Poor drainage along the side of my house
How might I not have to spend two hours in the rain digging trenches and becoming a grumpy, muddy woman after a large rain event?
“ Home improvement projects have been the bulk of my first year of homeownership. The rule is if it’s under $1k and it will take a weekend or less then we will give it a shot. ”
May of 2020, my wife and I took on our first fixer-upper and first home, and boy has it been a year. Sometime in the future, I’ll write the year in review post that talks about what went well, what was out of our expertise, and how much you can learn about yourself and your relationships by taking on a home that needs some love.
But this post will be about the problem I quickly learned about during heavy rains. FLOODING… specifically that my garage floods. That photo to the right was after I spent two hours in the pouring rain digging a large trench while my wife shoveled water out. This was the most extreme flooding we saw, but it was the final straw that pushed me to look into solutions.
Planning
I’m old school and have to draw out my plans… at work and for home projects
After some careful research on french drains, a few youtube videos, and a drain slope calculator I landed on a plan for the weekend. I placed my Home Depot order and persuaded a few friends to come out and get their hands dirty. We spent Friday plotting the trench path with rope and stakes and started digging. What I didn’t realize was how difficult digging trenches was. We woke up early the next day to continue the project. We only ran into a few issues… so let’s talk about the top 3 things I learned while building our french drains.
Insights
You have to go slow to go fast
We lost some time when we unexpectedly had to rent a two-person(maybe more like a three-person) auger from Home Depot. There are always unknowns in a project, and this was one of them. If we didn’t pivot and spend the time to get the auger, we would have added an extra day of work to dig the 4x4 foot hole for the dry well.
Plans should be flexible.
I had originally planned for roughly 70ft of drainage. 50ft of that along the side of the garage and an additional 20ft to keep the dry well and emitter far from the foundation. We ended up choosing to go with 30 ft instead of 50 ft along the side of the garage. It saved us time, materials, and the system is still over-engineered.
Sometimes you have to start and move past analysis paralysis
I spent days reading up and researching french drains, but looking back on it after watching a few videos and drawing up my plans, I could have skipped a lot of the extra research. As it is with most things, it’s best to get started and skip that step where you hold off starting in fear of messing up.
Outcome
After three days of back-breaking work, we were done, but now it was a waiting game to see if our french drains worked. Lucky enough the following week we had a very large rain event. I’ll let this photo speak for itself, but it was dry as a bone.
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