Upgrading the Side Drain Set-Up

On the north side of the house, along the kitchen addition that was finished in 2010, it was necessary to build a retaining wall because of the elevation of the foundation and how the property slopes gently upward from front to back. (Some pictures of before and after can be found within this blog post from May 2019.) Tucked in a small alcove back there are the two heat pumps. In order to properly drain run-off from the backyard and along that side of the house, there is a small drain pipe right in the corner of that retaining wall, to carry it all down to the front of the property inside the retaining wall alongside the original house structure. But over these last ten years, all this run-off seems to have gradually eroded the ground under the outermost heat pump, and it has begun to lean rather distinctly (as shown in the photo above).

Last summer I worked to build up the edge along that trough to stave off the continuing (and literal!) decline. That was just a temporary fix, and on my to-do list has been to work on a better drain setup back there...and that's the slip drawn from the quarantine task jar back on Monday, April 6th. It proved to be a three-day project! But I appreciate the challenges and the learning that go along with these do-it-yourself endeavors.

You know: like trying to determine the slope and marking it off correctly so that there is effective drainage along the new line.

And then just trying to be smart and resourceful about tying it all together. This also allowed me to connect the gutter downspout at that back corner of the house into the drain line, instead of running out free along the retaining wall.

For a number of years, I've had a loosely-buried plastic drain pipe serving to channel that water. Now I think I've got a better set-up:

I'm not satisfied with how I finished out this project and still need to do some thinking and designing to manage the backyard run-off.

The slope is much too gentle to also install a functional French drain, but perhaps I'll still dig out a gravel trough to help with issues of standing water that have developed over the years. At the moment, this second drain tray (foreground of photos above and below) is too high to receive any drainage but it does help to seal off the upper end for now. Over time, I'll figure out how to create an open drain at grade, perhaps by forming almost a mini-culvert there once I decide to toy around with cement again.