For many years we’ve had a serious drainage problem in our back yard …. every time it rained, we would get a big puddle in the back yard that would stick around for at least a week. The picture to the left is the back yard 3 or 4 days after a heavy rain.
At one point, Ginny was thinking about having a rain garden put in the back corner, but I wasn’t a big fan of that idea. We ended up dropping the idea because it would have taken a fair amount of maintenance.
In addition, our sump pump outlet was really close to the house and was not at all protected from freezing. More than once the sump pump pipe would freeze in the winter, after we had a thaw, and the pump would get close to burning out because it couldn’t pump water. Luckily I’ve always been home when this has happened … so I was able to remove the frozen section of PVC pipe and have it just dump out on to the lawn.
(If you haven’t noticed, we’ve had our fair share of water related house problems)
For years I kept saying I was going to get these two problems resolved. Well, I finally got off my butt and had it taken care of.
Last year, when we were having the heavy rains, I noticed there was some water coming into our basement … not a lot, but enough to be worrying. Ginny and I did a bit of investigating and found that water was pooling near the foundation of our house. We figured it had to do with our less than efficient gutters & downspouts.