Jen, Jeff and I moved into this house in Paoli
in February 2002. It's a huge house with 5 bedrooms and a
beautiful
backyard. Well it's not really a yard
since it backs up to designated open space by the township. The
place is
but it's been rented for a few years and not kept up
very well, so we decided to do a little spring cleaning on
the
outside. The first task was to fix our drainage problem. All
the downspouts had these ugly black pipes
dumping out into
the yard and washing itaway. So on my birthday I decided to get me
some new yard tools and
start digging. This was the first of our
drainage solutions. This is actually Jeff doing some digging.
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Here's the ditch with
some gravel and perforated drainage pipe. At the end we dug a
pit for overflow. Now why
would we go spending all this time and
money on a place we didn't own? For one it was ugly and we
kind of
care about what our place looks like. Two, we kept
telling ourselves this was the money we would be spending
on
cable if we had it. Also it provided knowledge and experience
for when we do own homes.
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Once the ditch was
completed we trucked in 4 (free) loads of top soil to fill in the
back yard and plant grass.
Without the drainage field, a
lot of this would have washed away from the downspout.
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On the other side of the
house we decided to try some old-school water conservation tricks
with new-school
styling. Remember the old rain barrels
found under gutters to collect water? We built something
similar. Here the
downspout from the front porch and the
downspout from the side of the house run together to collect in a
basin
we built
in the wooden box in
the ground. With the
water collected in the basin, we
can
water our flowers.
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Here's the tub. The
water comes in at the bottom of the picture. The pipe on the
left isthe overflow. You can see
it coming out in the picture above.
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Here's the
overflow.
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On the back side of the
house we built a similar bin, but it had to sit above ground.
Obviously the poor excuse for
concrete patio got in our
way. This one has an overflow as well, but it wasn't installed
at the time of
the picture.
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Again, ugly black pipe
and ugly landscaping, though I kind of like the rocks to the left.
Anyway Jeff decided he'd
apply his expert
free standing rock wall skills to this spot.
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The drainage pipe
here combines the downspout and a line running up the inside of the
driveway. They meet in
the middle and excess
flows across the driveway to be caught in the first drain
field/ditch
we built.
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The white sock covered
pipe is the one that runs
up the inside edge
of
the driveway.
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The Completed
wall.
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Once the drainage was
complete we hit the gutters to make sure water would flow into our
bins and pipes and not
gutter crud. This is Jeff on the
backside of the house. He's three stories up. We had to rent a
ladder to go this high.
It was a pain. It was heavy, scary and
very difficult to put up. Not only was the ladder a pain, the
gutter guards
don't work and the gutter
remains permanently clogged.
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That's a long ways
up. So we did this only once. We actually tried doing some of
the easier ones everytime they
got clogged, but it was just too
frequent (like once
a month).
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The last task was
trimming the dead limbs out of our trees. The front yard is
full of Honey Locust trees and Honey
Locusts are a pain for two
reasons. They have tiny little leaves that get everywhere.
They are the main reason for
the permanently clogged
gutters. The second problem with them is their lower limbs die
out. I think they're meant
for wide open spaces like the
savanna. When the lower limbs get too much shade they die and
droop. I cut enough
limbs to not only fill my truck 3
times, but make the
yard sunnier.
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And that was it. Since giving up on the
gutters, the only other difficulty has been grass. The drought of
2002 was the
main reason for no grass that year. This year
we did a little better, but it's still thin, the ground is still
clay and it just
doesn't
grow in the backyard. We'll keep trying. It's got to
take hold eventually.
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