My neighbor had a fit about my weeping tile setup, turns out he was right

I bought my house in Lethbridge about 5 years ago and thought I knew everything about drainage after watching a few YouTube videos. Dug out the whole perimeter myself and ran the weeping tile straight to the back corner of the lot. My neighbor Jim, been here since the 80s, came over and basically told me I was gonna flood my own foundation because the slope was wrong. Said I needed to tie into the city drain at the front curb or I'd be pumping water right back under my basement. I brushed him off for a month until we got that big rain in June 2022 and I had an inch of water in my crawl space. Spent $2,300 to have a proper drainage company come fix everything, including a sump pump and a proper outlet pipe. Now I water test every spring before the thaw and I actually listen when Jim talks about grading. Has anyone else had to redo their drainage after thinking they had it figured out?

2 comments

2 Comments

charles64014d agoMost Upvoted

Jim's exactly right about the grading thing, and that "I thought I knew everything after watching a few YouTube videos" part hits close to home. I did the same thing a few years back with my own gravel driveway, watched a couple videos on grading and compaction, then spent a weekend redoing the whole thing. Ended up with a low spot right by the garage door that collected water for weeks after every rain. Had to hire a guy with a bobcat to come scrape it all out and start over, cost me like $1,100 just to fix my own mess. The thing about those videos is they never show you the little details like proper slope percentages or how soil settles different in our clay-heavy ground around here.

logan_mitchell14d ago

That bit about the clay-heavy ground really rings a bell. What finally worked for me was adding a layer of crushed concrete first, then compacting it hard before putting the gravel on top.