Labor Day backstory and planning

For Labor Day this year, Aimee's Parents drove down for the weekend to help me with some of my ongoing projects, in fact two of the most daunting ones I have been planning for awhile.

When we bought our house 6 years ago, the inspection report identified that there was standing water under the house. In the months that followed, I realized that there were probably a couple things that may be contributing to it:

1. the plugged downspout drian by the garage that was pouring water right next to the garage foundation
2. the downspout drain that runs from the other side of the garage across the front of the house and somewhere to the backyard could have a break, hole or simply just be clogged and leaking out a seam
3. the 300-400 gallon pond by the front door which may have a leak
4. and possibly the fact that our groundwater is probably not far below surface since we live within a half mile to a major river running through town and it is just finding it's way into our house when it rains a lot.

I decided to have the downspout drains scoped with a camera to find out if they were clogged and where they drained.  It was almost a waste of money since they found that both of them were completely clogged and nothing else since the service guy was not able to get the camera past the debri. So...

Phase 2 of the plan was to take the downspout water out of the equation by diverting it to drywells that I would dig at the corners of the property to help dispell the water from around the house. I was not looking forward to this due to digging a 3 foot in diameter 4 foot deep hole by hand or at least with limited help of an auger.Hand opperated ones only get up to about 12-16 iunches and you still have to dig out the rest of the hole and loose dirt. But when I was at the big box store, I was talking to the tool rental mechanic and discovered that they rent a utility loader that has a 24 inch auger bit, a scoop bucket, and a trencher; all the things I would need for digging out the holes and trenches and moving the dirt and gravel around. So that solved a lot of the issues with digging holes that big.

Phase 3 was going to be regrading the ground around the house to help runoff go away from the house. There is a general bowl shaped grade to the ground around the house, so this would help direct any surface water away from the foundation.

The last phase was to eventually put in a sump pump under the house and move any water that may collect under there. This was going to be the last effort after the other phases were unsuccessful in removing enough water from around the house. I had looked into having a the crawlspace enclosed, but when that was not cost effective for our already upside down house, I looked into other contracted foundation draining systems. These were less expensive but still not very cost effective for our situation.

So the work began...

[to be continued...]