When the kitchen/bathrooms addition was put onto the house in 2009, the reworking of the gutters left me with one downspout that's not currently tied into the underground pipe/drainage system. The problem is the brick sidewalk from the parking area to the side porch; it will have to be torn up in order to run a drainline into the other drains that carry rainwater away from the house. In the meantime, I'm left with this black corrugated plastic pipe hooked (usually, or most of the time!) to the end of the drainspout. It doesn't quite get all the water to the parking lot to run out to the street, so I think this is creating more of an issue with my cellar flooding than should be the case. It is unfortunate that my general contractor, Peter LaRoque of LaRoque Construction in Mocksville, NC, thought this was a suitable way to leave things.
Because now, with the heavy rains of summer thunderstorms, I'm getting a lot of washing along the side of the porch, heading to the front of the property. Here are two pictures from a recent downpour, where you might be able to see how much water is flowing beside the porch:
What this is leading to is loss of my topsoil, and now the roots of the trees in the side yard are becoming increasingly exposed:
I'm going to have to rework the edges around that corner of the parking area to reduce the amount of run-off heading into and across the yard, at least in the meantime. Eventually, I hope to have this gutter draining into an underground pipe, connected with the other downspouts and channeled out the front retaining wall.
In the meantime, I've gotten a slightly longer plastic drainpipe (although it does not appear to be the 12-feet in length that was advertised on its packaging!) to route the water more directly to the parking lot itself. So far, this seems to have had a dramatic effect on how much water is coming into the cellar, though, which is excellent news.
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