Click. Hum. A gurgle in the discharge pipe. Then quiet. Three or four minutes later, click again. That was the soundtrack of most nights in April, when the rain kept coming and our sump pump in the northeast corner of the basement ran every few minutes. I timed it more than once from the basement stairs at midnight, which is not a hobby I recommend for anyone trying to fall asleep.
Some of that is just Michigan in April. The ground is saturated and the water table comes up, and a pump will run no matter what you do. But one rainy Saturday I put on a jacket and walked around the house, and it was obvious that we were helping the problem along.
What I saw in the rain
Both downspouts on the back of the house emptied within a foot of the foundation. The one at the northeast corner, right above the sump pit, dropped onto a cracked splash block that had tipped back toward the wall. And the lawn just outside the back door stoop had settled into a shallow bowl. Water from the roof landed there, sat there and, as far as I could tell, went straight down along the block wall to the drain tile and into the pit.
I didn't need an engineer to read that. I needed the water to go somewhere else.
Extensions first
I bought two solid downspout extensions and the elbows to go with them. I skipped the flexible accordion kind because the ones I've seen in the neighborhood sag in the middle and hold water. Each extension carries the water out about eight feet into the yard, where it lands on a new splash block and spreads into the lawn. They're not pretty. Tessa looked at them from the kitchen window and said, "They look like the house is sticking its tongue out," and that's fair.
Fixing the low spot
The regrade was the real work. The rule of thumb Gary and the internet agree on is about six inches of drop over the first ten feet away from the foundation. I drove two stakes, ran a string with a line level and measured. Instead of falling away, the ground by the stoop sloped about two inches toward the house over the first four feet. No wonder.
I hauled a yard and a half of screened topsoil from a landscape yard on the south side in two loads in the Tacoma, because the truck's springs had opinions about doing it in one. Topsoil instead of garden mix, because it packs down and holds a slope. Then it was wheelbarrow, rake, water, tamp, repeat, for most of a Saturday and a Sunday morning.
My mistake came in the first hour. I was so focused on building up the slope that I piled the dirt right up to the bottom of the siding. Gary leaned over the fence, looked at it for a while and said, "You're building a dam, not a ramp." He was right. You want a few inches of foundation showing between the soil and the siding so water and bugs don't get a free path into the wall. I raked it back, took the extra soil out farther into the yard and started the slope lower.
When it was done, I wet it down and tamped it with a hand tamper borrowed from Gary, then spread a coffee can of his leftover grass seed and a little straw on top.
The helper and the bill
Moose supervised all of this from the back stoop until the moment I turned my back, then walked the length of the fresh soil, lay down in the coolest part of it and left a trail of paw prints up the back stoop and into the kitchen. Tessa thinks he believes I dug him a bed.
The costs:
- Two solid extensions and elbows: $52
- Two splash blocks: $18
- 1.5 cubic yards of topsoil: $76
That's $146 and a sore back. Last Saturday it rained steadily for most of the afternoon, and I sat on the basement stairs again, partly out of habit. The pump ran four times in two hours. In April that would have been closer to thirty. The water table will still win sometimes in spring, and the pump is sixteen years old, so this isn't the end of the story. But for now the back corner drains the way a back corner should.
Gary says the dirt will settle over the summer and I'll be back out there in the fall with one more wheelbarrow. I believe him, so I left the tamper leaning by his garage instead of returning it.
