Tag: sidewalk

Drainage Project Construction

With the excavation complete, it’s time to put everything back together. We enlisted the help of my brother-in-law, Rob, to attach the 6-mil plastic sheeting to the houses on either side of the walk. The plastic lines the trench and ensures that water is only going where we want it to. Given the heavy clay soil we’re dealing with, we were concerned that water would find an easier time coming through the cracks in the brick than draining in the clay, so putting down plastic and gluing it to the houses makes sure there’s no other way for it to go. The plastic wraps across the front of the house as well, terminating in the small trench we dug across the front, which connects to the main trench along the side. Sarah and her sister, Nicole, put down a landscaping fabric in the front yard. Since we spent so much time digging up weeds, we wanted to do what we could to prevent their immediate return.

The next step was to run the pipes. Sarah’s dad, Mike, helped me get all the pipe from Menards and installed. We have a sock-wrapped perforated rigid pipe (holes down) that follows the trench across the front of the house, turns 90°, and then runs the length of the house in the bottom of the trench. This pipe will pick up water and channel it to the cancelled catch basin. Eventually it will go to a water feature/rain garden, but that will have to wait until we have the back yard done. There’s a second solid, rigid pipe that runs parallel to the first along the side of the house down the trench that picks up the downspouts. There’s a port for the (currently nonexistent) porch roof, a clean-out that could be re-purposed for a downspout if we end up having downspouts both front and back, and a port at the back of the house for the roof downspout. This pipe Y’s into the corrugated pipe and they both go to the catch basin. Because (a) we don’t have the rain garden set up yet and (b) we haven’t redone the roof and gutters yet, this pipe isn’t currently in use.

 

With the pipes in place we back-filled the trench and the front of the house with ¾” crushed limestone. This allows rain water to drain through to the pipes. We also continued the crushed stone as a base through the rest of the path that runs across the front yard to meet the front walk. I originally estimate this would be about 2 yards of stone, but it wound up being 5. We managed to do this in the most expensive way possible, because we wound up buying the first load of stone, followed by the pavers, followed by the second load of stone, followed by the load of fine-crushed stone (from a different company), and paying delivery fees every time. Better planning and estimating would have saved us probably $250. On top of that, we’d been looking at both the 24×24 and the 18×24 pavers. The 18×24 pavers were cheaper, but we’d need more of them, so they wound up being pretty much the same price. I decided on the 24×24, but instead the clerk sold me the 18×24 in the quantity of the 24×24, which we didn’t realize until they’d been delivered, so we didn’t have enough pavers. We decided to keep the 18×24, but had to go back and pick up 9 more pavers to finish the project.

Either way, we got the stone down and then put down the pavers. I wanted a large paver so that they wouldn’t move around even though they don’t have the typical sand underneath and they aren’t in direct contact with one another. The pavers are 18″x24″ Unilock “Rivenstone” bluestone. We’re hoping this means we’ll be able to buy more of them in a few years when it’s time to do the patio and continue the walkway through the back yard. I put the pavers into place using a 2×4 to space them and then Sarah fine-tuned with a string line on stakes to get them straight.

The last step was to spread fine-crushed stone around the pavers. This will still allow water to drain through, but holds the pavers in place and makes for an even walkway. We got a couple of yards of the finer stone and wound up with a wheelbarrow leftover that we’ll use to fill any low spots after a rain or two. We had looked at some chipped blue stone or other matching option and the price was horrifying, so we opted for the fine-crush and it looks nice, in my opinion. We also spread mulch around the front yard.

We haven’t had any water in the basement since we took up the old sidewalk, and I’m hoping it stays that way. I really think this will make a big difference, though I’m not thrilled with how quickly the cancelled catch basin fills up. Obviously, it’s cancelled, so it’s not expected to hold anything, but I was hoping it would handle a bit more rain than we’ve gotten. Once we’ve finished the house and can take up the concrete patio in the back yard, we can put in the water feature and hopefully solve it completely, but either way it should keep the basement dry. This was a big project, and as usual, we had a lot of help. A big thanks to Rob, Nicole, Sarah’s parents, my mom, plus Derek and Emily.

Drainage Project Excavation

Original sidewalk

Original sidewalk

Sorry that it’s taken so long to post, but we’ve been really busy with the house. I really thought I was done filling dumpsters with wheelbarrows of concrete, dirt, clay, and stone, but here we are again. The purpose of the drainage project is to prevent rain water from coming through the brick walls of our basement, but we’re accomplishing a lot of other things at the same time. I was planning to do this project after the house was done as part of landscaping, but after having moving into the basement and getting water every time it rained, we knew we needed to do something about it.

More dumpsters with concrete

More dumpsters with concrete

We got a dumpster delivered into the back yard (I believe this was dumpster #10) and broke up the sidewalk between our house and our neighbors, which runs from the front of the yard all the way to our basement steps. Technically, it keeps going to the back of the property, but that can wait. Under the sidewalk, on the side closer to our house, was a layer of asphalt, and under that was even older sidewalk. Under that was a really loose, oily black soil that I think might be fly ash or something. We couldn’t dig a trench in it, so I dug it all out and we filled the dumpster.

The result was a very uneven excavation down to the clay, but since we discovered that the yard slopes to the front of the house, while the drainage tench needed to slope to the back, we dug deeper in the middle and built up the side against our house. I used the laser level to keep things correct, with the typical drainage grade of 1″ every 8′. Factoring in the added slope of the yard, the end result was a trench close to two feet deep. Sarah’s brother, Will, took a crack at the trench digging, helping us knock out the last ten feet or so of trench, including the old concrete porch footings.

Will breaking up concrete

Will breaking up concrete

We also took off the concrete “apron” that ran along the front of the house around the bay window. Under that we discovered the original window sills. We’d had new sills put in by the brick tuck pointers last year, and they were in pretty bad shape having been buried in the yard. The front window sill in particular came apart with the concrete, leaving a gaping hole in the first wythe of brick. Sarah and I filled that in with bricks from our chimney and a judicious amount of mortar. Once that was set we back-filled with dirt and dug a small trench abut five feet out across the front of the house. We’ll have a front porch eventually, and this trench drains into the main trench under the sidewalk.

The next step was the rest of the front yard. We’d let it get overgrown with weeds and the two evergreen shrubs had gotten out of control over the years. I chopped both of them down and pulled out the root balls (pro tip: sledgehammer). The rest of the weeds came out as we I re-graded the whole yard to slope to the front. The next step was to cut the path the walk will take as it bends across the yard to meet the front walk. I used landscaping edging to mark it and then excavated everything. By this point we’d made a pretty big mess, and it was time to start putting it back together, but that can wait for the next post.

Laying out the path

Laying out the path

Thinking About Drainage

We’re slowly getting settled into the basement. Even after a few weeks, we still have a lot of stuff strewn about upstairs that we’re working on moving, putting into boxes, or outright getting rid of. Sarah’s been on an IKEA kick, loading up our humble abode with storage, since we’re completely lacking in the closet department. It’s starting to feel like home, though it definitely feels like a basement. Meanwhile, we’re thinking about next steps. After all, the whole point of moving into the basement is to get the rest of the project done. The next major step is second floor demo. We want to get that done before winter hits, mostly so that we can work inside all winter. However, we have to finish the aforementioned moving and clearing before that happens. We’ve also decided we need to make our drainage project happen sooner rather than later.

The drainage project was something we were planning to do in the landscaping phase, but the rainy weather has underscored that we need to control the flow of water into our basement. Essentially, it’s a just-below-grade weeping system that will wrap around the front and side of our house. The reason this was slated for the landscaping phase is that the goal is to drain this into a rain garden/water feature in the back yard. However, right now our back yard is mostly patio and we plan to keep it that way so we can bring in the parade of dumpsters and trucks that will get this project done. Instead, we’ll drain into our canceled catch basin for the time being and redirect it later. Our catch basin is filled with gravel, but it can still hold a couple-few hundred gallons of water, keep it away from the house, and drain into subsoil, all of which are critical to our basement staying dry.

The plan is to dig up the cracked and crumbling sidewalk along the side of the house, dig a trench that slopes to the center about a foot deep, and put down a plastic landscaping barrier that’s caulked to both our house and the neighbors. We’ll put perforated pipe in the bottom and backfill with stone. Lastly we’ll put in paver step stones in place of the sidewalk. As I said, the pipe will drain to the catch basin in the back yard for the time being and eventually drain to a water feature. We’ll put in connections so that when we redo the roof and gutters, the downspouts can drain into the system as well.

The drainage will eventually continue across the front of the house, minus the pavers, since we’re putting a new front porch over it. Ideally we’d have a proper exterior weeping system, which is a drainage pipe around the outside of the foundation at the bottom of the basement wall. Unfortunately, we’re very close to our neighbors. The North side of our house literally sits on the property line and both sides are between 3-4 feet away from the houses next door. Excavating down to the bottom of the 120-year-old brick wall risks not only our own structure, but the neighbors as well. The drainage project we’re doing is basically a compromise because the pipe won’t be below the frost line. If it got cold enough, especially after a snowmelt or heavy rain, it’s possible for the whole thing to freeze up. That said we believe it will keep the vast majority of water away from our foundation and out of our basement.

The dumpster is on order, and the project kicks off in a couple days. We need to get everything dug out in a week so that the dumpster can go back on time, but after the basement dig out, I’m not too worried about that. Once that’s done we need to get the barrier and pipe installed, then get some pea gravel delivered. Finally, we need to pick out some pavers. That’s the fun part.