DIY French Drain for Under $250

thanks for tuning in guys and good morning so today we're to do something a little bit different on the channel we are going to install a French drain alright so what is a French drain well let me show up this diagram right here and we'll talk about a little bit so what is a French drain well it's actually the entire system based around a corrugated perforated or drilled out pipe and what it allows to do is the water table as it rises during the rainstorm all the water actually pours in from the bottom into the pipe draining the water away from your home or wherever you're trying to drain it and typically you want to bury these pipes about 18 inches down at a minimum and then make sure it's on a downslope SAR kind of heading down a hill for us we have a system where we need to go and run down a hill about 80 feet alright so what we're gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and dig the hole put a pipe in the ground surround the pipe with some rocks alright just kind of some basic rocks you don't want to have too small like pebbles or anything like that can get into the holes and you're gonna wrap it in a fabric I and we'll talk about what you need here in a second and then you're gonna bury it and that is that so let's go ahead and talk about what you need to knock this project out ready to knock this out today we got this we got this let's do it so first thing we'll need to do of course is like I said dig this hole we already started last night actually today is Saturday morning this job is probably to take a good day or so but I wanted to start to kind of line everything up to kind of see how far we have to go and you can see you have to go all the way down to the bottom of that hill and under the fence and the good thing is it's already on a downslope so so I'm going to dig a hole about 18 inches deep which is that right about there currently then we should be good to go all the way down so you'll need a variety of shovels you can probably get away with just that kind of shovel right there just a basic 15 $20 shovel but I also went ahead and picked up a couple other shovels we had some already of course you will need a box like this here and what this is designed for is it actually goes under the gutter the reason being is this is called a water catch basin alright so you can see it there holes on both sides here and it is a nice kind of cover on here almost like a drainage cover and what it does is it actually goes and collects all the water coming out of the out of the actual gutter into this water basin one side is plugged off the other one has the pipe running out of it down the hill and this is gonna catch a bunch of water and stop debris from coming down the gutter like leaves and things like that and stop it up here and if it doesn't stop it here it will stop it because it's heavier than water typically right it'll stop it in the bottom of that base in there so we'll install that we'll show that to you guys this wrapped-up dead body I mean wrapped up material right here is actually a three foot by 300 nonwoven geo textile fabric all right so three foot wide by 300 feet long obviously overkill for this 90 foot job but this is a much better option get them right off Amazon for around 70 bucks it's a lot cheaper than your local hardware store and same thing with this box see this box the thing is on Amazon for like 38 bucks or something I'll put all the links down below for all this material for the most part all right so you definitely need that you will need some safety glasses or sunglasses as well as a tape measure so you can see you have your perforated pipe here we picked up a hundred-foot strand of it's a 4 inch corrugated perforated pipe you see all the slits in there all the way around so as the water table Rises or you potentially for groundwater comes down on a heavy rainfall this will help alright and we picked up ten bags of this rock right here it's pretty much doesn't really matter what kind of rock you are using I mean obviously this isn't gonna be drinking water or anything like that but try to find whatever you can that's affordable these are ten bags right here we'll see if we need more but the rocks of course as you saw in that diagram I'm gonna wrap around this pipe you're gonna wrap it up with fabric kind of like making a burrito or a sushi roll or something but 100-foot but of course we are only going to need about 80 potentially 90 feet depending on where I spit this out underneath the fence so you'll also need some help you're gonna help right yeah no you will probably need some help if you do it yourself this could take a couple of days I'm gonna get a couple of folks over here to see if they can help dig because digging is gonna be by far the most laborious part of this actual project and we're gonna take you guys along for the ride so it's not too bad I think we can probably do it in a day maybe a day and a half so let's get to it [Music] I probably mentioned for some reason he likes doing this right like what like terrific trucks Wow just like a show traffic trucks good look at that Colton that's a big one we good mm-hmm that's about a foot we got a few more inches to go huh so you'll see the wife helps skim off a few inches and we're putting that topsoil right there that's gonna help kind of get this all patched in nicely back when we get the dirt back on however it's not quite wide enough to where we want it because we need about eight inches down and at least maybe a foot wide so as you can see I'm slowly going down wetting it chopping up the dirt and that's just seen as we either can chop it up with this shovel and then with a squirt off shovel get in there scoop it out and once you go and launch one of these shovels in that dirt you're already a little over a foot down anyways so you can see it's not that bad the soil is pretty soft I also went ahead and spray painted you can see where the spray paint was on the topsoil here where the grass was spray painted it a line all the way down there so that way I know where we are so it's always super fun to find a fiber-optic cable running through your backyard that shouldn't have been there so I'm assuming the surveyors who just surveyed this property a few months back missed it or it could be defunct and not live right now but either way rather than divert this whole trench because it only runs about five feet down until cutting back into the center of the yard that way we're just going to dig underneath it because there's a lot of slack there and buried a little bit and then lay the French drain on top shouldn't be a problem all right so we actually reached the point where about a little over halfway and really that first part we're trying to be kind of careful trying to save that topsoil so we can put the grass back on try to give it the best chance throughout the summer or at rest the spring and summer to grow back in nice and flush but what I want to do here which makes this job so much easier if you're already gonna plan on putting new sod down or something we're gonna go ahead and mulch this area and kind of this is another project working on this is just like the first step is digging this drain I'll show you a much quicker way to dig these you can dig out almost three inches at a time and just go straight down the line and you're almost at the depth you need to be if you really don't care about the grass being kind of saved on top but you see how easy that is and you can go ahead and follow up as you go dig a little bit deeper little bit wider if you need to so quick status update we are done with the first maybe 10 feet of the project as you can see here and after that first 10 feet we do have most of it dug out it's just a matter of kind of digging in as deep as we need she's definitely funny wide he's looking really good just he's a little more depth to her if you look over here where we stopped was just about ten feet short of where we're ending we did run into an issue of having a lot of broken up rock in roots kind of just messing up with our digging part of this so I'm trying to get this dug out as best we can so that'll finish going this way and then going out of the fenced in area hi guys so we're almost done here so we dug it as deep as it needs to be almost at this point down here when they were into an issue which already described to you earlier we have this root system right which is from this tree that tree and this fig tree now this fig tree is actually something we're thinking about mulching anyways and kind of doing some landscaping this whole area this area was a natural run off for a long time so we want to do is we're going to dig this out throw as much as the root system as we can but there's also a bunch of rocks and kind of just sediment just build up over the years we're think about hitting this root right here where it's significantly drops off and then we kind of get a change of plan rather than running this whole system with the French drain out we're going on the French drain to here and then have it pop out right here for the downspout then take this pipe and we have a couple holes lying around hook it in this is a solid four inch corrugated pipe hook it in run it on top of the soil and then dig a little hole under the actual fence so it's not dumpling right into the fence dump it about two feet beyond the fence and then we're going to actually do another project which I don't know if we will film or not but we're gonna landscape this whole area make it really nice we're probably going to start leveling it off a little bit maybe make it a little bit of a little kind of retaining wall kind of thing right here just because it kind of drops off pretty steep and honestly I just hate mowing this area anyway so fig trees if you don't know wasps spiders they all just love like munching on them when they do kind of blossom so I really hate mowing around these and getting attacked by all sorts of insects so I wanted to kind of landscape this area anyways so this is a 9-inch catch basin made by NDS two nine by nine all right so what I did was plugged the one side of this and this is how they're built where the actual the hose attachments goes on the outside the pipe attachments go on the outside like this one with a plug on it kind of keep it lined up with the gutter I already measured a gutter kind of spits out right in this area though it's almost perfect all right you want the top level with the ground you want to fill some rocks at the bottom like I did go ahead Pat them down if you have one of these little tampers here they work really great Pat it down get a level make it level add rocks if you need to make this nice and level that way your pipe is it nice and flush all right so now that the hole is done trench is ready to go we have our nice fabric right here and how this is gonna work is basically you're going to roll it all the way down there I'll show you is probably easy just to roll it on top like this all right and you're gonna line the hole okay it's good if you have some stakes here we have a few people on site so we can probably hold it as we go but as you kind of have it stake down it's gonna go pretty much lining the actual hole then I'm gonna go talk about how will you put the rocks in so we're gonna line the hole first cut it where needs to be and we'll come back for the rocks all right so we got our fabric in the trench here I tucked it underneath the rain catch basin here just a little bit and I'm going to do is start lining the bottom with a little bit of these white rocks all right and you see just gonna do a nice little layer all the way down let's get that done I'm actually put a bead of silicone around this corrugated pipe when we put it in there just kind of help with a nice seal and also you can get this corrugated pipe tape which will be just nice to have this kind of extra protection there to keep this nice and attached inside your water basin so we'll do that then we start filling in the rocks around this we have a nice base layer all the way down when we use the rest of our rocks to fill it in and it'll wrap this up like a little burrito and then throw the dirt on it call it a day all right so we actually ended up doing is if you open this up here you'll see that you have the rocks on the bottom and then we're putting some around the sides here so what I'm doing is I'm actually filling some dirt on the sides as we go just because you might have have a you might have a wider trench than you need to but you want to be able to have the rocks on all sides of that pipe so if you narrow that up a little bit you can use less rocks and have it nice and surrounded as it should be so I put a little bit around the sides and we'll get the rocks and tuck them in alright so now that you have that dirt you can get the rocks to surround it much easier and waste let's rock thanks I'll be good to go so we're gonna keep on going down filling up there a little bit more and just finish this up alright so we're at the end like we talked about and all you have to do really is find out where you want to stop it so that we can put the other hose connect it in here or for you we're gonna do a drain or something like that kind of find it finish this downspout off so we're gonna do is just take a little hacksaw right here easy there you go now we're cut put the other piece on there get it nice and taped up and it'll be good to go all up [Music] so one of the things we are going to try to do is we skimmed off the top some of that original grass there and we're just going to kind of puzzle it back together on the top no promises it's going to work but it should help get the grass to kind of catch on and grow back where it was all missing some parts aren't going to have the greatest luck I think some of the holes are a little bit wider than we wanted to kind of Ridge initely have but we'll try to put some grass in and this stuff I mean a lot of it's not even like real grass really just want to rein them stuff so should growing just fine it usually grows in real quick within a couple of months and it's early spring right now so should have any problem growing in but this will help just trying to make sure get it level bet you can tamp it down a little bit step on it add some dirt if you lift it up you should be good to go [Music] alright guys I think I'm happy with how this turned out and we're at a stopping point for right now and I want to say it took about let's see a little bit on a Friday night about seven hours off and on I'm half a time playing with the kid for the most part on Saturday and about four hours on a Sunday so I mean if you take into consideration we had three people working off and on on this if you do it yourself expect to take the entire weekend if you do it just with a few people you can probably do it in a day if you really kind of hunker down knock it out digging is the hardest part let me walk you through the actual trench how it looks now maybe some pointers and some tips if I was going to do it again and then we'll wrap this video up let's go to this drain right here I went in really nice August I'm really liking how it turned out what I'm actually think my doing is taking that one of the flat bladed shovels and edging out maybe two inches around maybe like a two by two inch area all the way around and then filling with the right white rock just for aesthetics before it starts growing in with the grass I think I look really nice maybe even raise it up just a hair just so that it's a little bit easier to trim with the weed whacker or when you're mowing that's gonna look really nice overall digging like I said took a pretty pretty long time that was the most effort honestly I learned a few things along the way when you're skimming some of the grass you know you can put it back as well as you can but it's just not gonna fit perfectly so you'll see we filled in certain spots with some extra dirt and the grass will going just fine if you have nice sod which is this is not nice obviously this is kind of natural growth if you do have nice sod makes you skim the exact portion and take your time because that way you can put it maybe on the left side then put all your dirt you dig out on the right side and then you have an exact place all right but make sure you measure it out take your time if you really care about it we didn't care that much just because this is just natural growth so pointer there if you want to keep it nice and just replace the grass on top and skim off the surface you can put her down really nice just take your time walking down here you'll see this is going to grow in really nice I went ahead and scraped with a shovel all this dirt to kind of shake up the grass so that grass will kind of pop up through kind of that mud there we're about to get some storms over the next couple of days but I think we'll see it kind of get a good test on how this runs but also it should flatten this out a little bit more right now it's pretty level all the way around I'm just kind of using that skin shovel skimming off the top again pretty happy how this turned out starting about here is kind of where we kind of didn't really skim off the top too much because down here the unfinished portion for the most part I don't know what I want to do for the landscaping yet I want to landscape this tree and this tree something about landscaping it around all the way up here so it might actually cover up that pipe right there so I haven't really dug this out much and I dumped a lot of spare dirt more than you need over here so I dumped all of our spare dirt right here and kind of half buried this pipe and that pipe is now going out to a nice recycled we're usable a little downspout there so I used this from an old pipe system that was already at the house and one of these little concrete run offs and an angle pointed down with that little spout going just over the top I think this will work awesome it's gonna look good flow really well so if we need to and we decide to like stop the landscape and we do we write like a right there kind of slope up then what we'll do is I'll dig this out and bury it and all you'll see is this part down here and one thing I will say underneath all of this right here one thing I did do and you saw how I poured the rocks around that pipe we only have about two or three maybe layers of rocks around all the pipes so it's not like a thick layer so if you want and save some time you maybe dig a small hole and then use the amount of rocks that I just used or if you want to really do a proper French drain the more rocks the better the more rocks you can kind of put between the pipe that perforated pipe and the fabric is the way to go so you'll see in a lot of different ways a lot of people go and put like a whole thick layer of rocks are on the entire pie and that's why you did such a wide hole I tried to save some money I could have bought 3040 bags of rocks haven't wanted to but not make this project more expensive so someone think about you can buy more rocks there's no real kind of negative part about that the more rocks the better as long as that fabric can reach around it cuz member the fabric is a 300 by 3-foot fabric so I'm sure you guys are asked well how much does this really cost because you're I'm doing it myself we're cutting out the labor for the most part although getting labor from your your family and stuff maybe cost like some pizza and some beer or something but overall I'm cutting almost all that labor out do it yourself this whole project with all materials cost two hundred and twenty seven dollars and fourteen cents that's right under three hundred dollars under two hundred fifty dollars I mean we're not quite done yet cuz I kind of wanted to include the price probably on a hundred bucks to landscape this with all the mulch and everything we're gonna need probably not honest anymore who knows but depends on how we wanted to look but you can see you can save some really good money if you do it yourself so just another DIY project that actually work pretty well so any of the stuff we use some of us from Amazon some of some Lowe's and Home Depot I'll put all the links down below the build list is down below with some links if I can find them go ahead check them out down in the description below if you guys have any questions at all about this project or any kind of helpful tips because I'm think about doing something similar with the front yard which is also honestly worse because it really needs a French rating up there there's a spot where the Sun never hits for about ten feet about ten feet by three feet wide it's just dirt and nothing ever grows there something about doing some kind of drainage there it because it really pulls up about three inches of water when it does rain it pretty much any amount if you guys have any tips at all hit them in the comments below if you have any questions at all hit in the comments below as well as always subscribe to the channel like this video and I'll see you the next review [Music]

Channel: Gear Know-How

Views: 271,213

Rating: 4.7331123 out of 5

Keywords: diy, do it yourself, french drain, drain, diy french drain, corrugated, corrugated pipe, gear know how, gear know-how, diy project, how does a french drain work, french drain install, outdoor enthusiast, how to install french drain, how to install a french drain, backyard, yard, diy home, tiny home, backyard drainage, lowes, amazon, shovel, dig, french drain project

Id: OanjbeWWY5s

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020