To keep our basement as dry as possible, we’ve been working on installing a french drain around the house. A french drain is basically a trench filled with gravel and containing a perforated pipe that redirects surface water and groundwater away from an area, see this wiki for more information. This trench didn’t need much work as the builders had cleared a lot of the soil away when they rebuilt it – this was the first wall to collapse.
We’ll need wait until Thomas and Matt remove the large pile of old wall debris from the front of the house as this is the area that the water will drain into. Once that is removed we can continue the trench and then lay the gravel, pipe and filter fabric (used to stop the gravel from clogging up with soil etc).
It was quite tiring throwing the soil clear of the ditch but the weather was perfect, a crisp autumn day. This was were we removed the tree stump from last week and you can see some of the remaining roots sticking out from the deck on the right. In the background Aimee is building a fire to burn the roots etc. We’ll often finish the day with a beer around a fire 🙂