Foundation drain update

I’m getting a bit tired of this drain, as must you readers, but it would be a shame to stop reporting on it now. It’s taken us ages to get where we are today, but we’re not cutting corners and we had a lot of things to deal with such as:

• Dig out trench – no mean task, especially as it kept collapsing
• Repair poor footings and add bevel
• Remove old wall plaster, repair wall, re-plaster and white wash
• Remove old cast iron sewer pipe
• Grade channel to correct depth
• Install geotextile, gravel, pipe and dimple board etc …

So a few weeks ago we parged the side wall, we only did the lower half as once we have filled in the trench it will be easier to do the top half. Again the ToolCrete sprayer was invaluable and I can highly recommend it, okay cleaning it is a bit of pain, but then cleaning always is. Last week we limewashing the plaster, cleared out the trench after another landslide and started to grade it.

This last weekend we pretty much finished preparing the trench for the pipe which involved getting the slope right so when we added gravel, the pipe would have a gradient close to 1/8″ per foot (0.6°).

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We couldn’t find the pre-drilled pipe locally so we had to drill about 50 3/8″ holes in each pipe. We assembled most of it on the lawn and then dragged it into the trench. The vertical pipes you see are clean out points in case the pipe ever gets clogged. I’ll probably bury these a few inches below the surface but mark their locations somewhere.

So first down in the trench was the heavy duty geo-textile fabric, this will help keep the gravel from getting clogged up with fine particles and this will wrap around both pipe and gravel. Next down was 2″ of gravel followed by the pipe which was set a gradient of a little less than 1°. And now at last we can start to fill in the damn trench!!!

We bucketed in the gravel as it was tricky to walk down the trench with the pipe there, but as we start to fill it up we may be able to get a wheel barrow down there. Luckily we weren’t alone in this task and Aimee’s friends came around to help, wow, what a difference a few more hands make.

I can’t thank Kerry, Rich, Jesse and T-E-A-L enough for their help, in addition to which, Kerry and Rich brought over the most delicious food and wine, incredible!!!! Unluckily for us we had less gravel than we thought so worked stopped on the early side, that said, people said they’d help again and we already have a fresh pile of gravel sitting on the drive, just waiting for you all! I can’t thank you enough and I was touched by your help and enthusiasm.

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Kingston is having it’s yearly O+ Festival this coming weekend so there won’t be much happening at the house. The following weekend however we’ll be installing the dimple board and then continue to fill up with gravel.

P.S. In case you’re interested in what the back of the house looked like before we dug this trench, check out these old posts:

• Work continues on back path
• Grading the rear path

And also some photos, we almost forget we have a drive!!! Sometimes all this work seems a step back, but at least we’ve got rid of that horrible wall behind the rear windows, now hopefully you’ll be able to see the garden from the ground floor.

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This coming Sunday (13th October) we’re hosting another gravel moving party so if anyone has any spare time please consider helping us out for an hour or two, it would be a huge help to us 🙂 We’re still bucketing it in and we’re filling the buckets to about a 1/3 full so we’re talking maybe 15lbs.