Drainage and grading correction

Macomb County has a clay problem

Much of the county sits on heavy clay. Clay does not drain - it holds water, swells when wet, shrinks when dry, and heaves when frozen. Add flat postwar subdivision grading and downspouts that discharge two feet from a foundation, and you get the standing water that half of our first site visits turn out to be about.

Near the lake - Harrison Township, St. Clair Shores, parts of New Baltimore - it is the opposite problem: sandy soil that drains beautifully but sits on a high water table, so the water has nowhere lower to go.

What actually fixes it

• Regrading. The first six to ten feet around a foundation should fall away from the house. On a lot of older properties it no longer does, because settled backfill has reversed the slope. Fixing that solves more wet basements than any product will.
• Downspout extensions. Unglamorous, cheap, and startlingly effective. A single downspout can put thousands of gallons a year right against your foundation.
• French drains. A perforated pipe in a stone trench, wrapped in fabric, running to somewhere sensible. Genuinely effective when there is somewhere for the water to go, and pointless when there is not.
• Dry wells. For when there is nowhere lower - a buried reservoir that holds water and lets it percolate away slowly.
• Catch basins. For a low spot that collects water no amount of regrading will fix.

Why we bring this up during patio quotes

Because if water currently pools where you want to sit, building a patio there makes it worse, not better - you have just added an impermeable surface to a drainage problem. We would rather tell you that at the quote stage than build something that fails and blame the weather.

Sometimes drainage is a line item in a patio project. Occasionally it turns out to be the entire project, and the patio can wait a year. We will say so.