Installing a Catch Basin and Dry Well System

You know how inside your house when you go to fix one little thing it exposes another problem and then you’re up to your eyeballs in unexpected repairs?  Yeah, I do that outside too.  One thing always leads to another.  I told you 2 weeks ago that I moved a skip laurel bush around in my yard.  They are evergreen and I am loving how it blocks the view of all the crap behind my shed.  So much so that I decided to dig up our 3rd, and final, skip laurel and move it inline with the other two.  But alas, I was smart enough to have the hubby do the digging and moving this time.  OMG took him no time at all!  Damn my inferior muscles.  This was the plan. But as you can see I wanted to put it smack in the middle of our dry rock river, or wibber as my son calls it.  Now this thing is not for decorative purposes at all.  It does an awesome job sucking the massive quantities of water that flood under my shed, coming from my neighbor’s property, during a heavy rain.  Feel free to check out this post, this post, and this post to see what I mean.  The bottom line is that I need something to handle the water that accumulates in the gravel area next to the skip laurels.  So what’s a girl to do?  I channel my inner Ahmed Hassan and install a drain and well system.

One of the eyesores behind my shed was a dry well (similar to this one) that we were going to use elsewhere and never did.  We also had corrugated drain pipe left over.  The correct choice for this project is SOLID corrugated pipe, which will move the water from the catch basin to the well, but will not take water out of the ground and away from the plants near by.  The purpose of this pipe is to move water, and for that you use solid piping.  Oops.  The only thing we had to buy for this project was a catch basin and grate.   I probably would have bought something bigger than 9″, but hubby’s the one who ran to Lowe’s.  He said he didn’t know I was going to hide it under the gravel.  I think the 9″ will be fine.

So after we moved a ton of the rocks (those things were in the front yard when we moved in and I’ve since moved them all over the place) and I replanted the skip laurel, it was time to decided where to put the well.  I pointed and hubby dug.  Yeah, I’m no dummy.  He’s a great hole digger.  Wait till next weekend when I milk Mother’s Day for all it’s worth!

The pipe will run this way.

Here it is with the well in the ground, without the top on it.  It’s wrapped in the landscape fabric to keep dirt from getting inside or clogging up the holes.  This well has holes to let the water seep out slowly back into the ground.  I’m all about landscape fabric for keeping dirt out of drainage systems, or between dirt and gravel, but I don’t use it as a weed block in case you were wondering.   The drain pipe is wearing a sock (similar to this) for the same reason, to keep dirt from getting in the holes.  In this case, the holes pull moisture into the drain, which we don’t want because it will be pulling it away from the plants, but I figure I can get away with it because the water is traveling such a short distance to the well, and then it can seep back out.  I guess time will tell.

I double checked to makes sure the pipe was flowing downhill and that everything fit correctly.

Once everything looked good, I wrapped the up the well and started to bury it. 

And here’s the nitty gritty of it.Tada!  Now I still have to find a place for all that rock!!  I also realized I have a ton of other different drainage fixes I’ve used around the yard and maybe one day I’ll get around to writing about those too.  Maybe.