Barnesfolio

Ten years ago, I looked at half of the front yard of our newly purchased house and had an idea. A garden wall. Sit, talk, watch the stars. Plant some flowers too, though I am not a flower person. Over the years I had developed an extreme dislike for the pebbles covering the area. I hate pebbles. (No disrespect to Fred. Or was it Barney? I could never get that resolved).

Digging Stuff
Laying out the wall was easy. Digging the trench for drainage around the wall was dictated by the location of the wall. I discovered that the drainage should be behind the wall, not in front of it. A major tidbit of knowledge. If left to my own devices, I am pretty sure I would have dug the trench in front of the wall. Live and google and learn, right?

One of the major advantages of a french drain is moving water away from the foundation of a building. This was not a major concern for me because I intended to put a thirty-two inch wide walkway along the wall of the house which would keep water away from the foundation. It also shortened the length of the french drain pipe. Using a standard four inch, four foot long PVC pipe from the drainage sink for the down pipe gutters to the start of the drainage pipe allowed me to lay down walk-way pavers without concern of sinking pavers.

A Word About Trench Digging
Hard. Scary too unless you know where the gas, electric and communication lines are laid underground. Luckily we had the utility lines mapped ten years ago. They haven’t moved. Also luckily, utility companies lay lines with ninety-degree angles. Simplifies avoid-that-spot problems.

What It’s Like to Finish

All that dirt dug up digging the trench? It goes back into the garden walls which are lined with a brick wall-liner and weed guard fabric. Then comes the shrubs, fountain grass and yellow and red roses. Yeah, right, flowers. They replace the knock-out roses we planted when we first moved into the house. In fact, if asked, I would say the whole french drain, garden wall project was to replace the roses I managed to accidentally destroy by over-zealous bug eradication. Luckily, nobody asked.

The most rewarding part of completing a project like this are the little things: drilling small holes in the gutter drain sinks setting on top of gravel to make absolutely, positively certain there is no standing water in the system; burying the pop-up drainage spout just level with the ground so that it is hardly noticeable (it sets at the mid-point of the wall); fortifying and compacting the dirt where there were once shrubs and a tree planted to make sure the ground does not sink unevenly over time; laying out a watering system to avoid lording over dry soil with a garden hose. The little stuff.

Aesthetics, sure. But nobody asks why.