Service
Drainage and Grading in Atlanta
French drains, regrading and downspout runs for yards that hold water after every storm.
Atlanta gets its rain in bursts. A summer storm can drop an inch in half an hour, and red clay cannot absorb anything close to that rate. The water sheets across the surface instead and collects wherever the low point is, which on a lot of properties is a back corner of the house. That is why yards here stay soupy for days after everyone else has dried out, why grass dies in the same patch every year, and why crawlspaces smell damp all summer. Drainage and grading in Atlanta is mostly about giving water a faster route to somewhere else.
We start by working out where the water is coming from and where it can actually go, because that second part decides the whole design. There is no sense installing a drain line that has nowhere to daylight. Often the first fix is the cheapest one. Gutters packed with pine straw overflow at the corners and dump hundreds of gallons directly against the foundation, and downspouts that discharge two feet from the wall do the same thing by design. Burying and extending those to a pop-up emitter well out in the yard solves a surprising number of wet yards on its own.
When the yard itself is the problem, the tools are regrading, swales, French drains and catch basins. Regrading resets the fall so surface water leaves instead of pooling against the house. A swale is a shallow shaped channel that carries sheet flow along a route you chose rather than the one it picked. A French drain is a trench of washed stone around a perforated pipe wrapped in fabric, which collects water out of the soil and moves it. Catch basins take a defined low spot and drop it straight into that pipe. Most real jobs use two or three of these together, because water arrives from more than one direction.
Two things we will be straight about. Fabric and clean stone matter more here than almost anywhere, because Georgia clay silts a drain line closed, and a system installed without proper separation quietly stops working within a few years. And a drainage system has to end somewhere sensible, not at the property line pointed at a neighbor. If the honest answer to your yard is a bigger job than you were hoping for, you will hear that before we take the work.
Common questions
- Water stands in my yard for two days after a storm. Can that be fixed?
- Usually, yes, but the fix depends on why it is standing. If the yard is holding water because it has no fall, the answer is regrading or a swale. If water is arriving from a neighboring property or off a roof, the answer starts upstream at the source. If it is sitting in a defined low spot, a catch basin tied into a piped run is often the most direct solution. It starts with figuring out where the water enters and where it can leave.
- Is a French drain always the answer?
- No. A French drain moves water that is in the soil, and it needs somewhere lower to discharge. On a flat lot with no outlet, or where the real problem is surface water sheeting off a roof or a driveway, it is the wrong tool and it will disappoint you. Surface water is usually better handled by regrading, a swale, or catch basins.
- What affects the price of a drainage job?
- Trench length and depth first, then whether a machine can get to the work or it has to be dug by hand. Rock near the surface slows everything down. After that, the number of catch basins and downspout tie-ins, how far the run has to travel to reach an outlet, and putting the yard back together afterward with soil and sod.
- Will this stop water getting into my crawlspace or basement?
- Managing the water outside solves a large share of these problems, because most of it is roof runoff and surface flow arriving at the foundation. Get the gutters, downspouts and grade right and the crawlspace often dries out. If water is still coming through the wall after that, it is a waterproofing job on the structure, and that is a different contractor. We will tell you which one you are looking at.
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