The Whole 9 Yards

We finished off the gravel shoveling on Sunday. Whew! My mom asked how much 9 yards of gravel weighs, so I did a calculation and found out that we shoveled about 7 tons. A quarter of the gravel was moved via the tractor, the rest by us. So I guess we moved about 5.25 tons completely by hand. Still, no small feat! And the pile is almost completely gone, too. We’re glad we didn’t run out! Here are some pictures of the incredible shrinking pile of drain gravel.

We have front steps again! It is so nice to be able to get to our front door without twisting an ankle. One of our neighbors (an older woman) dropped by Saturday evening to give us a piece of mail that had accidentally been delivered to her house. She gave us a tomato from her garden as well, which was very sweet of her. Her balance isn’t so good, but she navigated the gravel pile like a pro. We felt bad, though. Next time she comes over, hopefully she’ll have an easier time of it now that the pile is gone.

One of the things we realized on Saturday was that the French drain was getting way too shallow to be of any use. The whole point of this endeavor is to catch water before it has an opportunity to get into out crawl space. We came up with the idea to use a sump basin to catch the water from our deep French drain on the west side of the house and pump it up to the level of the shallow French drain whose depth was dictated by the catch basin way down at the street. My spouse came up with a great location for it, too! Here’s a diagram of what we did.

We used some hose clamps, landscape fabric, and Gorilla Tape to seal 4” pipe that comes in low into the sump basin. BTW, Gorilla Tape is one of the stickiest things we’ve ever run across. It’s like duct (or duck) tape on steroids. Wow! We highly recommend it for all your heavy duty taping needs! Here are some pictures of the sump basin as it was installed.

In order to catch as much water as possible, we ran some pipe from the French drain to our down spouts, too. Now all the water that falls on the west side of our roof will not just soak the earth on the west side of our house. The extra water will be pumped away. We tested our system and it worked great. Right now the pump’s electrical cord just plugs into an extension cord under the carport, but we’ll run some electrical line out to a GFCI outlet in the future (maybe after we clean up the carport).

As mentioned before, all the gravel has been moved to its new home. All landscape fabric has been laid down on top of the gravel (to minimize silt from ruining the effectiveness of the gravel). Unfortunately, we still have about forty feet of trench to fill with dirt (about 6-10 inches deep). Not a lot, but we’re still not done. We’ll be shoveling during the evening this week. What fun! The end is in sight for the French drain project, and that is worth celebrating. Here are a few pictures of the French drain in progress. If you notice a dog in any of the pictures and are wondering, “Did they get a dog?” the answer is that we were dog-sitting a great dog named Sidney this weekend. He’s really sweet and stayed out of the way (for the most part).