Drainage and grading

Macomb County sits largely on heavy clay. Clay does not absorb water at any useful rate, so water arriving on your lot moves across the surface until something stops it — and what stops it is frequently your foundation, your patio, or the low corner of your yard.

Almost every recurring hardscape and ice complaint we are called about traces back to water arriving somewhere it should not.

Start with the cheapest possible fix

Before anyone quotes a French drain, three things are worth checking, and all of them are cheap:

• Downspout discharge. A downspout dumping at the foundation delivers thousands of gallons a year to the worst possible place. A $60 extension moving it ten feet away solves a startling proportion of the problems we are called about.
• Grade at the foundation. The ground should fall roughly six inches over the first ten feet away from the house. Over decades, settlement and mulch build-up reverse it.
• Where the neighbor's water goes. Sometimes the water is not yours, and that is a conversation rather than an excavation.

We check those first and tell you when that is the whole job. It is a smaller invoice and it is the right answer more often than the trade admits.

What a French drain actually is

A perforated pipe in a trench of clean angular stone wrapped in filter fabric, sloped to daylight or to a suitable outlet. Water enters through the stone, the pipe carries it, and it discharges somewhere useful.

The two failure modes are both simple. First, no outlet — a drain that terminates in the middle of a clay yard is a buried bathtub. Second, no fabric or the wrong stone — fines migrate in, the voids clog, and it stops draining within a few years. On flat lots in Lenox Township and Harrison Township, finding a genuine outlet is the hard part of the design, not the trenching.

Grading, and its limits

Regrading moves water by changing the shape of the ground. It works well and it is permanent when done properly. What it cannot do is move water uphill, and it cannot solve a problem where there is nowhere lower to send it. On a flat lot bounded by neighbors on both sides, grading alone sometimes has no answer, and we would rather say that than take money to push soil around.

Why this matters before any hardscape

A patio built across a drainage path relocates the problem by inches. A retaining wall built in a drainage path ponds water behind it and increases the pressure it was built to resist. If we are quoting hardscape and we see a drainage issue, we raise it first — including when it means the project gets postponed.

Sump discharge in winter

One specifically local point: a sump pump discharging near a driveway in February creates a sheet of ice that no amount of salt keeps ahead of. If your driveway has one patch that ices every storm, look for the sump line before you buy more de-icer.