The drainage work continues, but now I’m really seeing the end. After the demolition work in the last post, I continued to dig down along the side of the house. About where there’s some rock poking up through the lawn, I ran into the rock, too. Not entirely unexpected. Continuing to dig, the rock dropped away and I decided it was time to leave the house and head across the lawn to make it to the property line before running into the cesspool… Once I had a trench going across the lawn and down the side a bit, it was finally almost at ground level.

Now “all” that remained to finalize the trench was another round with the demolition hammer. I did 6 hours yesterday, and 3 hours more today, of breaking up some rock, putting a pipe in, and measuring the slope. After a whole lot of sweat, dirt, (but no tears or significant amounts of blood yet), the trench is now pretty much graded. Here’s what the side of the house looks like now:

Finally, I can put a length of pipe into the trench and have it slope basically downhill the entire way.

The trench crossing the lawn and out into the planter bed along the property line.

After evaluating various online advice, I decided to not use the 4″ corrugated plastic pipe after all. Apart from people saying it crushes easily, because it’s flexible it would be very difficult to get it to maintain an even grade when the trench is so uneven as this one is. Instead, I got 50 feet of 3″ perforated PVC pipe at HPM. Since this is rigid, it’s easy to tell what the slope is and if it’s evenly supported. I cut the appropriate lengths and test-fitted it around the house.

The pipe along the front of the house, with a cleanout access at the corner (next to the one for the cast iron sewage pipe from the kitchen.)

The little “Christmas tree” in the middle of the pipe is for joining the pipe from the downspout.

Down the side of the house, I’m only using perforated pipe for the first 10 feet. After that, the pipe runs in the trenched-out bedrock, so there should be no significant amounts of water coming in there. This also allows me to join the pipe from the downspout and let them both use the same final transport pipe down to the edge of the property. I added two 45-degree tees that will simultaneously make an entry for the downspout pipe and an access hole.

What you really don’t want happening is having the water from the downspout back up and flood the perforated section of the pipe. That’s why I’m running the downspout pipe underground in parallel with the perforated pipe until maybe 3ft past the perforated section before joining them. Since there’s an access hole, it will also be possible to check that the water isn’t backing up into the perforated pipe.

Now that I’ve test fitted the pipe and verified that the grade is basically OK the entire way (the final adjustment will be done by adding back some fill to the sections that don’t have enough slope) it’s time to start gluing the pipe together and filling it up, starting from the bottom. Maybe there’s an end to this project, too.