The drainage project

Before we start work on the garage, we needed to fix our drainage problem. When it rains, all the water on that side of the slab collects in the garage. Tuesday, we had it fixed!

Here's the before. It's a bit hard to tell, but in some areas the slab is actually higher than the garage floor.

We hired a landscape company. First they cut through our very crappy slab in two parallel lines, then broke up the cement with a jackhammer.

Nice and neat. They also fixed the worst part of the garage floor there.

This is where the new drain will connect via underground pipe to a catch basin on the side of the garage.

We were surprised when they uncovered two pipes right where the catch basin needed to go. 

Tomu had to call the city to come out and they determined that the metal pipe on the left was an old gas pipe that could be removed. The PVC pipe is a waterline from our house. We can only assume it was a part of a sprinkler system at some time. When the guys cut into it, water came out and they had to shut our water off!

Here you can see how they rerouted that pipe around the basin.

The catch basin opening after it's been buried.

Here's the trench drain that fits in the opening they cut in front of the garage.

They fit the grate in and smooth the new cement, then remove and clean the grate.

Beautiful! The grate can be removed to clean debris from the trench.

The crew left all the soil. When they were done, we put weedcloth and a paver over the catch basin holes to keep out loose soil.

Here Amaya is waiting to rake soil with daddy. We covered the pavers with soil.

Tomu used some of the extra soil to shore up the inside of the coop.

The guys were very fast and we are confident that this system will work well for us. The catch basin they installed is perforated at the base so the water will seep into the soil as it collects. This type of system works perfectly in super sandy soil like ours. The basin can hold 50 gallons!