General Jackassery

Well, I haven’t had much chance to exercise lately and I haven’t had that much time to work around the house, so my solution is to combine the two. You see, I have a minor drainage problem on my back porch. The entire back side of the house drains to two down spouts and said down spouts outlet on either end of my back porch. This wouldn’t be a huge problem except that the earth that butts up to the porch wasn’t properly graded and it essentially diverts all of the water from the high-side down spout across the porch. When it rains there’s a large volume of standing water that the dogs love to run through. As a result of this my back porch stays dirty and muddy all the time. The solution? Well I’m going to dig a 110 ft long trench 1 ft wide and varying from 10 inches to 2 ft deep, then I’m going to lay geo-fabric in said trench, place 2″ of rock in the bottom, tie the two down spouts to the pipe and run the pipe the length of the trench to daylight it in the wall of the ditch that runs on the west side of my property. Then I’m going to cover the pipe with 2 more inches of rock, fill the rest of the trench with sand and top soil, take the remaining dirt from the trenching and fill all the holes that the dogs (current and previous) have dug. Finally I will re-seed all of the disturbed areas and hopefully my drainage issues will be solved, my porch will stay clean and will not continue to try to break my riding lawn mower by driving into craters that the dogs dig. How, you might ask, am I planning to do all this work? Good ol’ fashioned elbow grease baby! The trenching will require the use of a pick-ax, a shovel and a wheel barrel. Then it will be a matter of wheel barrel load after wheel barrel load of rock, sand and soil. We’re talking about several tons of material. So, that’s where the exercise comes in.

Fun! The next project will be to attempt to raise the gutters in areas so that they drain properly instead of allowing water to stand in them. Maybe THAT will solve some of the Mosquito problem that I have.