How to Grade Around a Foundation | This Old House

when the inspector inspected the house his major concern was this area right here as you can see the soil is coming up against the house and it seems to be washing down from our neighbor's yard underneath the slats of this fence there a little bit uphill from us right not only does the soil come down but all the water is coming down and going right against the host right now in new construction we would want eight inches of airspace between this row of shingles in the soil mmm here you have two or three inches of soil built right up against your shingles right and that can lead to three things cop and Orient's termites and rot if you get rot in here it's not only gonna do the shingles it's gonna get to the sill underneath do you have any suggestions I do in is usually one of my projects the first step is digging so let's get some tools and get started sounds good we're gonna take out 8 inches of soil along the first course of the shingles then we're gonna get to fill it in with stone the whole length the whole wing Oh Roger look at this look at all this rot just what I was afraid of yeah but more importantly than the shingles I'd have someone check that sill underneath and make sure the rots not in there good thing we did this huh yes how's it going Roger it's going great so we've excavated so much that we are now down 10 inches below the seed of shingles that's perfect now we have to remember that your neighbor's yard is higher than your yacht and because we excavated out all his dirt wants to come down into your yacht so the first thing I did is I set up a string line which runs from your backyard all the way down to your front now that string lining is about two inches higher than your neighbor's yard so what we're going to do is we're going to set pressure-treated two by twelves up to the line and they're going to act as a retaining wall using a circular saw I cut two foot pieces of pressure-treated 2x4 and then I cut a point on the end now we're going to drive these in next to the post and what that's going to do is hold the post in place but also provide us a place to screw in the two by twelves when I Drive these in I like to use a piece of composite wood and that I'll keep the 2x4 from splitting now with all the pressure of your neighbors soil pushing on the back of these two by twelves I want to take another one of our two-by-four appointed stakes and drive it right in front I'm simply going to start it and then bang it down in place now with our retaining wall in place in the grade lowered below the shingles I want to collect the water that's coming out of this downspout as the water pours out here it's running along the shingles it's causing rot here also causing mildew on the side of the house now we're going to collect this water in a PVC pipe and run it right out to the front yard so what I want you to do is dig me a trench right down the middle sounds great with a trench dug down about 6 inches we're ready to connect this solid PVC pipe and we're just going to connect it up to the downspout elbow I'm just gonna line it up push to me good there we go now to stop water and dirt from splashing up on the house and to improve drainage we're gonna add some stone on top of this pipe we're just about done the four inch pipe runs all the way from the backyard out to the front yard where daylight's right next to your front yard downspout the water's just gonna run off you

Channel: This Old House

Views: 1,099,370

Rating: 4.7938652 out of 5

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Gardening, yard, lawn, Foundation, Do It Yourself, Landscaping, LandscapeHome Repair, roger cook, landscaping ideas, landscaping for beginners, how to landscape around house, landscaping how to guide

Id: 7wlslzFTQP0

Length: 3min 50sec (230 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 08 2015