French Drain

Last year in the spring, we noticed in my art room in the basement there was some moisture coming in after a big rain storm. After it happened a few more times we knew we needed to remedy the problem. Thankfully there is no sign of mold and we didn't want anything to start! After lots of research it looked like a french drain would do the trick. They can be as uncomplicated as just gravel to pull water away or just a pipe. We did a combination.

Digging down hill

The arrow is pointing to where all the damage is and the highest point of the drain. 

The builders of this house did a poor job grading the yard and one of the low points is that corner of the house. So after digging it out, we found the seam of the footer outside had a portion of the concrete chipped away from years of water damage. 

Can you see it on the right of this picture?

We filled it all in with a foundation repair concrete patch. It's still wet in this photo.

 

 The trench ends behind the retaining wall. We laid a small layer of gravel first, then a socked perforated pipe, then covered it all with more gravel.

Once our recent snow melts and the ground thaws we will finish grading the soil so it drains away from the foundation.

The digging was pretty much the only hard part. It was just time consuming. We probably could have gone a little deeper with the trench where the grass is because we didn't have much room for the sod after we filled it all in. Whoops! I'm hoping the grass will still grow over it :)

 

 

Sod back in place.