The Big UnDig!

My goal for the last couple of weeks has been to install the perimeter drain and the drain for the gutter and backfill everything.  This meant lots of time on the tractor and lots of time spent crawling around in the mud. 

The perimeter drain is basically just a long piece of perforated pipe laid in a bed of gravel.  Steph and I had several discussions around whether the pipe should be laid with the holes up or with the holes down.  Intuition said holes up, but the correct way turns out to be holes down.  The perimeter drain isn't meant to move large volumes of water quickly, it's meant to constantly move small volumes of water.  This means that if the holes are down, the water can be pretty shallow and still get into the pipe where it'll drain away.  If the holes are up, the water has to be at least four inches deep to get into the pipe.  I'd rather have water a half inch deep than four inches deep.  There should never really be much more than a trickle coming out of the system.  The water that this system moves has percolated down through the soil at a pretty slow rate.  In comparison, the gutter pipe is meant to move large volumes of water relatively quickly, so that pipe is solid and has a steeper slope. 

My original thought was to plumb the gutters into the same perimeter drain system, but a bit of research pointed out that I didn't want to add more water to that area - the whole point of the perimeter drain was to remove water from that area. 

A side note on researching this project - I've been amazed at the vast amount of information that's available for free on the internet.  Obviously, a lot of sifting is required to separate the good information from the bad, but I simply couldn't have done this project without it. 

Speaking of things I couldn't have done this project without - the star of this episode is my neighbor John's John Deere 3038e tractor.

It's a compact tractor - the wheelbase is only 5 feet.  This came in really handy on this project.  If it weren't for this puppy, I'd be renting a bobcat for a couple hundred bucks a day.  

Day one started out smoothly enough.  My first task was to move all of the clay that had been excavated so I could get in there to backfill with rock and sand.  What I didn't realize (because I'd slept through it) was that there was a massive downpour the night before.  My backyard isn't particularly prone to being real dry anyway, so it wasn't long until disaster struck. 

Yep. That's stuck.  The front wheel on the right hand side is actually underground here.  It's hard to get one stuck, but when it's stuck, it's really in there.  Eventually, I stumbled upon the (rather obvious) method of using the bucket to lift the front wheels out of the mud.  Once I did that, I grabbed my wheelbarrow and attempted to dump in a load of crushed stone.  That's when I got my wheelbarrow stuck.  In an attempt to get my wheelbarrow unstuck, I stepped off the high spot and into a wheel rut, and I got myself stuck.

These boots are 16" tall.  That stuff's deep!

Eventually, I managed to get a bunch of loads of sand, stone and a few random bits of firewood under the front wheels. I did this by laying sheets of plywood over the muddy sections of the yard. Eventually, I put enough stuff in the hole that I was able to lower the wheels back onto it and drive it out.

Notice the suspiciously tractor-sized hole in the yard?

If ever there was an indication of the water problems in the backyard, here it is.  Over the course of next few days, I very nearly got stuck several other times, but the bucket trick got me out every time.   I also hit upon the idea of adding a bucket or two full of sand to the wetter areas whenever it was getting especially soft.  This made a huge difference as well. 

Once I got my old dirt moved over, I had room to get in there to drop a load of crushed stone.  Then, I laid the first bit of pipe!

Note that we're not going all the way around the house here - eventually I'll be doing the other end.  Once the state gives me the go-ahead to dig in that part of the world, at any rate.

The pipe here is covered with a polyester sock that supposed to filter out most of the crap, but there's a layer of geotextile fabric on either side of the crushed stone, too, to keep out the finer stuff. 

I ended up laying two runs of pipe rather than my originally planned single run.  Steph pointed out one morning that pipe was pretty cheap, and excavation is expensive and time consuming, so why not lay two runs? 

After I laid the pipe, I moved in more stone, put a layer of geotextile filter fabric on top of that, and backfilled with sand. 

This messy cross-section shows pretty well my multi-point strategy for keeping water out of the basement:

1.  Redo the tar on the foundation
2.  Add a waterproof dimpled membrane to keep water off the foundation and relieve hydrostatic pressure
3.  Add a perimeter drain system
4.  Backfill with fast-draining sand instead of clay
5.  Re-grade away from the house instead of towards it

You can't, of course, see the interior perimeter drain or the gutters in this shot, but if all this doesn't keep the place dry, I don't know what would. 

By the end of the first day, I'd managed to lay only about 20 feet of pipe - moving stuff around was taking a lot longer than I thought it would.  I did manage to make it around the corner, though. 
 

See?  Corners!

Another thing I learned off of the internet - when you're doing corners, you shouldn't use 90° elbows.  Instead, you should use two 45° bends.  Roto-rooter or similar systems apparently have a difficult time making a 90° corner, but can handle the 45° corners with relative ease.  Thanks, internet! 

At the end of the first day, the kids came home from school and were immediately fascinated by the tractor. 

Eddie saddled up first, but I couldn't fit both of us on it at the same time so he could drive...

Naomi, on the other hand, was small enough that I could put her to work!

A girl and her tractor...

The next day, I filled in the corner.  This odd looking bit of plumbing is the pipe to the gutter.  The capped leg off the wye is in case I want to tie in another drain.  I'm thinking I'll need this to drain the backyard. I don't know if I'll tackle that until the spring, though. 

Two runs of perimeter drain and the gutter drain:

Add stone, sand, soil. Repeat.

It's coming right at me!

When we originally removed the old patio slider, Jim said he wanted the panes of glass.  He wasn't sure what, exactly, he'd need them for, but he definitely wanted them.  I put them aside back in May, and they've been moved around the property ever since.  Their final resting place was leaning up against the front porch.  This seemed a great place to leave them, until the kids decided to start throwing hunks of clay at each other. 

Cause, you know, there's no way anybody coulda' predicted that this was gonna happen.

This made for a helluva mess. A rather pretty mess, as it turns out.

Oooh, look!  Early snow!

Shiny, scratchy, very sharp snow.

Once I got that cleaned up, it was back to hauling dirt around.  Progress on this side of the house was much faster as I didn't have to move the old crappy clay soil out of the way.  The soil from the side of the house was much sandier and should drain just fine, so I just needed to move it back into the hole.  I even managed to do this without getting the tractor stuck, or falling into the excavated hole.  I had to take down a few little trees and some branches to get the tractor in there, and I got the chainsaw stuck when a tree went entirely the wrong way on me.  But, no problem, tractor to the rescue!  A bit of chain tied to the bucket, and the saw was unstuck in no time.

Seriously.  This thing kicks so much ass.  

Before I knew it, I was done!  The first part of the backfilling took so long, that I was kinda surprised to find that suddenly there were no more holes to fill.

About the only thing left to do for the perimeter drain was to add some grates to keep the rodents out.  I glued the grates into the fittings, but I didn't glue the fittings onto the pipe, so if I need to get in there, I don't need to cut anything.  I had a spastic moment while priming the various parts.  I found out that purple primer tastes about like it smells, which is to say "very bad".

My ghetto workbench - the trailer currently residing in the middle of my front yard.  Cause we're classy like that. 

Then, I just had to tap them in place on the ends of the pipes, and...

Perimeter drain!

That's a wrap!