DIY French Drain & Landscaping | River Rock | Yard Drainage Solution

all right welcome back to the channel my name is Ryan the project that we're looking at today is this rock landscaping bed behind me this was really an experiment on my part to try to solve two problems I wanted to get water away from my foundation so I put in a curtain style or French style drain to try to eliminate some of that water problems that I'm having and then the other thing was I hadn't done any and anything to my landscaping since I bought the house about a year ago so it was getting overgrown and just not looking so hot so I wanted to find a low maintenance option to try to fix that so I hope you guys stick around and see what I did if you liked the video as always please like comment subscribe and let's get to it alright first step is to remove all the bushes I'm using a small chainsaw as always remember safety first probably shouldn't be doing this in shorts but at least I have safety glasses and hearing protection on after all the bushes are gone I want to make sure that I come back around and dig out all the stumps it's an easy time to do this and it'll help us a lot in the next steps to come once the landscaping blocks or pavers are out of the way then I use white paint to mark out where I want the edge of the bed to be the next thing that I wanted to do was establish the grade of the bed you can see next to the concrete I went about an inch and a half to two inches deep and then I gently sloped it uphill towards the house so that there's more dirt by the house than by the edge of the bed it is important to note I didn't want to take too much dirt out of here especially near the concrete enough to create an edge but not enough to undermine the concrete now the fun part we remove all the dirt establishing the overall grade right now is really nice because when I come back in later and put in my trench I know that both sides the yard in the landscaping bed are already at the correct height and I don't have to worry about anything then [Music] [Applause] [Music] now I need to remove the sod I'm gonna save these and water these for later so that I can patch some of the brown areas in my yard I guess since I love digging trenches so much and I have easy dirt to dig I'm gonna go ahead and dig this one again myself you could rent a machine to do this like a trench or you could also rent like a mini excavator this trench is about 56 feet long now it took me a little while to dig I'm not gonna lie but I love the results and how squared the trench comes out at the deepest point it's about 14 inches deep and it's around 10 inches wide so this thing should be should flow a lot of water hold a lot of gravel which is exactly what I'm looking for here when you're digging these trenches normally you want to start off on the low side and work your way back up that way you never run out of slope or you never run out of fall I knew how deep the pipe was that I was connecting to so I didn't really have to plan for that [Music] [Applause] [Music] so as you can see the drain is going to start at the concrete and then there's a French drain that I've already installed right on the other side of the fence an easy way to check for slope as you're digging the trench or to double check yourself right after you're done is to use a level this is a four-foot level and I just started off on the high part of the trench and just kept sliding the level down as I went as long as the bubble is on the high side you're know you're good this isn't a very technical way of doing it but it'll tell you if you're going downhill alright for my last drainage video I found out that some people love the geotextile fabric and some people don't not necessarily a requirement of a French drain but something that I do like to put in there this is like I said a geotextile fabric it's a 3.5 ounce fabric it's four feet wide in the rolls 300 feet long so the whole purpose of this is to keep the pipe from silting up it'll let water go through but not let dirt through sometimes the fabric can be tricky to work with on these larger rolls or longer trenches personally I like to roll the fabric out across the entire length of the trench then I come back and step it down into the trench I really want to make sure that the the fabric step down to the bottom of the trench and it's squared off into basically into the corners that way when we're pouring our gravel in later it's not stretching or pulling the fabric over I also really like to pin the fabric in place so that if it's windy it's not blowing it around or moving it around and it stays in place while you're pouring the gravel in as well all right here's the pipe that I bought from Lowe's this is a hundred foot roll of corrugated perforated pipe corrugated meaning that it has those ridges and then perforated meaning that it has those four slits that go around it to let in water when you take a look at the pipe in the trench I have it capped off into the tee up from the tee there's a riser to the surface then it's laid down at the of the trench right on top of the fabric it goes down here into another tea that has a riser coming straight up and then out on the other side of that tea it continues down underneath the fence where it connects into a French drain that I put in last year now there's many ways that I could have connected this pipe into the other one I didn't feel like digging it up and putting in a tea so I used this here and this is a gutter connector and then this is an example of what I'm cutting out of the pipe that's already in the ground on the other side of the fence so I'm cutting out that square so that the gutter connector will fit into there now the nice thing about this is since the gutter connector sits up a little bit higher than the bottom of the French drain that I already have installed water is going to be able to run down that other French drain without backing into this drain here as well as water we'll still be able to flow downhill into the other one and we shouldn't have any problems alright so now it's time to add the gravel that goes in the trench for this part I'm using a number 57 washed river gravel I want round stones because it'll leave bigger voids or cavities so that it'll flow water better and also you can see that I have patio pavers in here temporarily so that I can hold my pipe down on the bottom of the trench I do this because in theory that fabric should keep all the dirt out some people like to put a bed of gravel underneath the pipe to help keep silt from coming up into their pipe in theory my fabric should do that for me so you can see the pipes right down at the bottom I have plenty of stone on either side of the pipe and then I have plenty of stone over top of the pipe and it's filled up about two inches from the height of the sod now it's time to wrap the fabric over the top all I'm doing is removing the pins that I held it in place with earlier pulling it tight over the top folding the other piece over the top and then using those pins to pin it in place some people like to cut the fabric at this point so you don't have too much overlap luckily I only have 3/4 inches maybe of overlap here so I think I'm going to be fine just something to consider and then this layer of fabric will help protect from any silt or debris getting in from the top that gets filtered down through the other rock that I'm going to put on top of it you you alright so the next thing that I had to address was the end of this planting bed so I removed a ton of dirt over here and now I have a huge difference from the level of the actual planting bed where I'm putting in rocks and where is the the area that's now going to be grasped over so I'm using these larger rocks that I found in other areas of my yard to act as a retaining wall I started off by just digging little trenches or ditches for them to sit in adjusting and manipulating them until they fit pretty well together and I came out with a pretty good product where these three lot rocks are going to link together to create a little retaining wall to cap off the end of my landscaping area all right so here's the stone that I'm using if you've seen my previous video you already know what this is the place that I bought it from called it a mini cobble so it's a little bit different than size 34 gravel or some people call it twos and threes this has everything from one-inch stone all the way up to four inch stone which i think is really cool I think there's a lot of variation in size and shape that make that gives it a really cool look the only downside is it's $55 a ton and is not exactly the easiest thing to shovel this was not fun to load all of this up [Music] all right here you can take a look at how I'm spreading this rock in the landscaping area around the plants I'm trying to go three to four inches thick and then obviously it's much thicker in the drain area so that it maintains that level and goes level right into the edge of my yard there as you can see I'm not using a weed barrier or weed fabric at all instead I'm just using preen all right so yes I did say that I'm not using a weed barrier or a weed fabric in this gravel area that I put in right when I moved in this house about a year ago it's a good example you can see that I'm still getting weeds in this area I don't believe there is a maintenance-free option or an option where you're never going to get wheats but as you can see when I pulled that weed out the the roots popped right out the weed came right out because it has nothing to anchor to when I install this I put in about three to four inches of gravel deep enough where it's going to be really hard for those roots to get all the way down to the dirt to anchor into so you can see when I dig down here there is no weed barrier but that gravel is pretty deep the other nice thing about this is is when I do get weeds and I have to pull them out it's not anchored into any fabric it hasn't gotten itself into any fabric so you're not pulling the fabric out you can purely just pull the weed out I can move the gravel around and put it right back just like it was before so it's still pretty darn easy to maintain [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right once all the gravel is spread we need to make sure that we go back and water the plants but the more fun part and the more rewarding part is to wash off the actual stone itself you can see that once I start spraying it with water all that sand and silt that's on there because it's not a washed gravel I didn't buy a wash gravel all that sand and silt is starting to wash off and you can really see the true color variations of the rocks you can see the stuff that I didn't wash off versus the stuff that I washed off all the different colors are starting to pop and it's really starting to look pretty good using some of the dirt that I pulled out of the landscaping area earlier I regraded this made sure that I put at least four inches of dirt over top of the trench to help promote the growth of the grass don't want that drying out and then I used the leftover sod to redefine this edge and make a nice sharp edge so that it stays nice and defined well the other areas growing in now that it's time to see the area I kept it pretty simple I went down to Lowe's and got a starter fertilizer by Scotts and then I've had a really good success with this pennington smart seed for Ohio it's their Ohio mix it has perennial ryegrass in it which germinate is pretty fast five to 10 days or so and then also it has a high mixture of Kentucky bluegrass between the two of those this area gets a lot of Sun and a lot of shade so this this grass seed should work pretty well now I didn't need to get out the fertilizer spreader but I had it on hand so I figured why not so I spread out the grass seed then I came back and put on a coat of the starter fertilizer as it recommends on the back of the back one thing that I always like to do is is to rake in both of these things not real heavy just a light raking over top to try to mix the seed the the fertilizer in the dirt all in together to help promote that seed growth then a kind of thin layer of straw over top I use straw just a lot help lock in the moisture and then also to keep like birds and animals and stuff from eating the seed then the only thing to do after that is to water it I like to water at night or early in the morning I've heard that it's not great to water grass or plants in the middle of the day when the sun's out all right it's about two weeks later now and I'm really I'm really liking the way that this looked I think combining the drain and the low maintenance Rock option for the landscaping is gonna be really awesome it's ranged quite a few times since we put this in and the rocks keep looking better every time that it rains because it keeps washing more and more silt and dirt off of them I don't have water pooling up or collecting in the areas that I did before so it kind of shows me that it's working the only downside I guess is the plants these are plants that I reused I didn't buy any of this stuff I just dug it up and moved it some of them are still stressed out a little bit but I think that will all kind of take care of itself by next year the grass is starting to come in so within five to seven days just like it says on the bag the the perennial rye started to come in I'm not seeing a whole lot of the Kentucky bluegrass yet but that will come with time I do want to take a second to explain a few things so when we look at this the risers that come up from the pipe so I had those tees down in the bottom and those risers that come up some people might ask what what's the purpose of those and really the purpose of those risers is nothing they're there for my own personal curiosity it's a place where I can wash out the drain if I need to so I can stick hose in there and wash it out if I ever wanted to but if I took the time to actually put the pipe in the ground and dig the trench and everything I kind of like to see what's going on in there so I left those risers in there just for my own curiosity one other thing that I wanted to explain was that this is a French style drain some people call it a French drain some people call it a curtain drain from my understanding curtain drain goes around the perimeter of your house or an area and a French drain is just a drain that's an open gravel drain so that is really what this is I use that fabric burrito style drain as well and I think that's gonna be really awesome because if you think about this the entire surface of that drain or the tire front of my landscaping bed is like a blind inlet the entire thing is a surface water drain water is just going to go straight through that that gravel go down through the fabric and into more gravel and then into the pipe and get out of here really quickly and that's why those surface drains are those those verticals that come up that's why they don't do anything because the water is already going to be going through the gravel and getting right into the drain and out here as fast as possible one other thing that I wanted to kind of touch on is if you're gonna try something like this I highly recommend using small plants something with a small root base because these plants the plants that I have in here hostas and the tall grasses their root systems stay pretty compact and pretty close to the actual plane itself you wouldn't want to put in trees or really big bushes in these areas because those roots are gonna try to find water in the area where that water is going to be is in the drain and you don't want a ton of roots trying to get into your drain if you can if you can one other thing you may want to think about is trying to pick plants that are drought resistant or don't need a ton of water because the objective of that drain is to be pulling water out of the ground so it's gonna naturally dry up these areas a whole lot faster so if you have plants that need a lot of water that may not be so good another thing that I wanted to kind of touch on was why didn't I go with mulch you could do this this style landscaping with mulch in theory that geo textile fabric that we put in is going to keep any of the mulch or the decaying dirt or anything that goes along with that from getting in your drain you could do that if you wanted to for me it was a it was a maintenance thing rocks don't decay very fast anyway so this is something these rocks are something that I'll never have to replace maybe here in five or ten years I'll have to order a little bit more and just dress them up and put some over the top but the low maintenance part of it is something that I really liked alright I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you made it this far at least you were semi interested in it I hope you guys like comment subscribe and hopefully I see in the next one

Channel: That Tech Teacher

Views: 898,921

Rating: 4.9114079 out of 5

Keywords: That tech teacher, DIY, do it yourself, home improvement, yard drainage, how to install a french drain, french drains, french drain pipe, french drain system, french drain diy, french drain installation, curtain drain, french drain depth, french drain cover, yard drain, yard drains, yard water solutions, apple drains, fix wet yard, drainage solutions, soggy yard, drain, drainage, french drain man, lawn drain, landscaping, River rock, diy landscaping

Id: SjZ95sGaD-k

Length: 20min 8sec (1208 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020