Yard Drainage, French Drains and Grading for Red-Clay Yards

Water sits in these yards because the ground can’t take it

Every yard from Dunwoody to Brookhaven sits on Cecil-series red clay: a few inches of topsoil over kaolinite clay that drains at a fraction of an inch an hour. Add a roof that dumps a thousand gallons off one downspout in a good storm, a lot graded toward the house in 1968, and an uphill neighbor, and you get the calls we get: a back corner that stays soft for four days, a crawlspace with a musty smell, mulch that washes into the street, a creek bank that’s a foot closer to the fence than it was last year.

We’ve fixed a lot of these. Drainage, grading and erosion control are about a third of what we do, and it’s work that gets done with electric excavation and compaction equipment charged from solar on the trailer. No exhaust in your crawlspace vent, no engine noise for the neighbors.

Call (404) 369-0989 or book a free site visit. We’ll walk the yard in the rain if you want.

What we build

Underground downspout extensions. The cheapest, highest-return fix in the book. Solid pipe from the downspout to a pop-up emitter or a discharge point away from the foundation.

French drains. Perforated pipe in a gravel trench wrapped in fabric, set to grade, carrying subsurface water to an outlet. Interceptor drains along a property line to catch the uphill neighbor’s water; curtain drains around a foundation; drains under a lawn that won’t dry. More on French drain installation.

Catch basins and channel drains. Surface inlets at the low spot of a lawn or patio; channel drains cut into a driveway or across a walk where sheet flow crosses.

Dry creek beds. A shaped channel lined with fabric and river stone that carries storm flow across a yard and looks like it belongs.

Regrading. When the yard slopes toward the house or has a bowl in the middle, we cut and fill to move the water, then sod or seed. Fill dirt and topsoil delivered and placed by the yard.

Slope repair and erosion control. Terracing, boulder walls, Dirt Locker systems on banks too steep to plant, native grasses and groundcovers that hold soil (river oats, little bluestem, green-and-gold). Where a wall is the answer, see retaining walls.

Creek bank stabilization. Stone toe protection and native plantings on lots along Nancy Creek, Peachtree Creek, Crooked Creek and their branches, inside the rules for stream buffers.

Sump and dry-well systems where there’s nowhere to discharge.

How we decide what you need

We walk the property and look at four things: where the water comes from (roof, driveway, uphill), where it’s going now, where it’s allowed to go (your property line, the street, a storm inlet, a creek), and what the soil does between the two. Then we quote in writing, by the foot and by the piece, so you can see what each part costs and drop what you don’t need. Most drainage problems are solved with two of the pieces above, not all of them.

Rules that matter by city

Dunwoody: land disturbance permit for grading; anything in the 75-foot stream buffer needs the city arborist and stormwater review; gravel counts as impervious and street-facing yards are capped at 35% hard surface.
Sandy Springs: 75-foot stream buffer (25 state, 25 city, 25 impervious setback); no disturbance within 50 feet of state waters; Development Code 9.4.3 limits rear-yard regrading.
Brookhaven: stream buffers on Nancy and Peachtree Creek and the Murphey Candler branches; trees four inches and up need a permit if the work touches them.
Chamblee: land disturbance pre-screen for driveway work; the city is at the top of two impaired watersheds and favours permeable surfaces and rain gardens.
Peachtree Corners: a Land Development Permit over 5,000 square feet disturbed, with on-site retention of the first inch of rain; extra review within 2,000 feet of the Chattahoochee.
Residential French drains and downspout extensions don’t need a permit anywhere in the area.

What clients say

“Lloyd’s expertise is unmatched. He identified affordable and effective solutions for our water drainage issues. We’re so grateful to Lloyd and his team for their fast and efficient project execution.” – Deena M. (Google)

“Our back yard now feels like a completely different space. He was very responsive and prompt, and helped us tackle some issues outside the original scope of the job.” – Kevin B. (Google)

The floods this part of Atlanta has not forgotten

If you have lived north of the Perimeter for twenty years you already know these dates. If you moved here recently, they explain why your neighbours react the way they do to a heavy forecast.

2004, 2005 and 2009. Nancy Creek came up hard in September 2004 and again in July 2005. Then in September 2009 it crested near eighteen and a half feet, and the Peachtree Dunwoody Road bridge was shut for six months afterwards. That was not a hundred-year storm hitting empty countryside. It was a big storm landing on a watershed that had been paved a little more every year for four decades.

The catchment is bigger than people picture. The upper Nancy Creek watershed covers something like twelve thousand acres spread across Brookhaven, Dunwoody, Chamblee, Doraville and Sandy Springs. Water that starts as rain on a roof in Dunwoody is in a Brookhaven back yard within the hour. That is why a drainage problem is so rarely caused by anything on the property it shows up on.

Why a yard that was fine for thirty years is not fine now. This is the single most common thing we hear, and the answer is usually that nothing about your yard changed at all. What changed is upstream: a house came down and a bigger one went up with more roof and a wider driveway, three neighbours added additions, a cul-de-sac got resurfaced. Every one of those sends a little more water down the same path a little faster, and at some point your low corner stops keeping up. Nobody did anything wrong. The arithmetic just moved.

What that means for a fix. It means we look past your property line before quoting anything. Where the water enters, how much of it is yours and how much arrives from somewhere else, where it wants to go and what it hits on the way. A solution designed only for the water that falls on your own roof will work beautifully in a normal week and fail in the storm you actually bought it for.

When there is nowhere to send the water

Most drainage work is straightforward: collect the water, carry it, and let it out somewhere lower than where it started. The hard jobs are the ones with no somewhere lower. Flat lots, houses at the bottom of a street, back gardens hemmed in on three sides. Here is the honest order we work through.

First, is there a legal outlet at all. A pipe has to come out somewhere, and you cannot collect water into a pipe and aim it at a neighbour. Concentrating flow and discharging it onto adjoining property is exactly the thing that turns a yard problem into a dispute. So the first question is always whether there is a lower point on your own land, a street or a public system that will take it.

If there is not, we try to put it into the ground. Dry wells and infiltration trenches store water in a gravel void and let it soak away slowly. They work, and they are the quietest and cheapest thing to maintain. But they need two conditions and we test rather than assume: enough space to hold a real volume, and subsoil that will actually accept water. On tight red clay subsoil the second one often fails. We dig a test hole and time how fast it drops before we design anything around it, because a dry well in ground that will not drain is just an expensive hole that stays full.

Then we look at shape. A shallow swale, planted or stone-lined, moves water across a yard without a pipe and slows it down on the way. A rain garden in the low corner, sized against the roof area feeding it and planted with things that do not mind a wet week, holds a surprising amount. Peachtree Corners has built bioswales along Bankers Industrial Drive for exactly this reason, at a much larger scale. Shaping ground is usually cheaper than burying pipe, it needs no maintenance beyond ordinary gardening, and it does not fail silently the way a blocked line does.

Reduce what arrives in the first place. Permeable paving instead of solid where a solid surface is not earning its keep, gravel over a proper base, planted beds in place of turf on the slope that sheds fastest. None of this is glamorous and all of it works, and in several of these cities it also helps with the hard-surface limits the permit office cares about.

A pump is the last option, not the first. Sometimes a basement-level patio or a walk-out at the bottom of a hill genuinely has no gravity answer, and then a sump and a pump with a check valve is the right call. We will say so. We will also be straight about what it costs you in the long run: it needs power, it needs servicing, and the moment it is most likely to fail is a long storm with the power out, which is precisely the moment you needed it. If there is a gravity solution we will find it first.

And sometimes the answer is that we cannot fix all of it. A yard at the bottom of a large catchment can be made much better and cannot always be made perfect. We would rather tell you what a fix will and will not do before you pay for it than let you discover the limits during the next big September.

Questions people ask

What does drainage work cost? It depends on how far the water has to travel and what it has to get through, so we quote by the foot and by the piece after a free site visit rather than off a price list.

Do I need a permit for a French drain in Georgia? Not for a residential French drain or downspout extension. Regrading that moves a lot of soil, or any work inside a stream buffer, gets city review.

Does clay soil need a French drain? Clay is why French drains exist. The trench and gravel give water a path the clay won’t.

How long does a French drain last? Twenty to thirty years if it’s built with fabric, washed gravel and pipe set to grade and the outlet stays clear. The ones that fail early were built without fabric and silted up.

Can I just extend the downspouts? Often, yes. It’s the first thing we try, and for a lot of houses it’s the whole fix.

My yard floods from the neighbor uphill. Whose problem is it? Legally, usually yours. Practically, an interceptor drain along the property line fixes it.

What about the crawlspace? Getting the downspouts away from the foundation and adding a curtain drain fixes most damp crawlspaces. If water is coming up through the floor, that’s a waterproofing contractor and we’ll say so.

Do you do commercial drainage? Yes: parking-lot inlets, retention areas, erosion repair on slopes and along walks. See commercial maintenance.

Is electric equipment strong enough to dig? Yes. Battery excavation and compaction tools, recharged from the trailer’s solar panels.

Where we work

Red clay behaves much the same across this part of the metro, but lot sizes, creek buffers and permit desks do not. That is what the city pages are for: Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Brookhaven, Chamblee, Doraville and Peachtree Corners. Commercial sites sit on the Perimeter Center page.

Two cities have a drainage page of their own, with the local permit rules and watershed detail written into them: Dunwoody and Brookhaven.

A fair number of drainage calls turn out to be about a hard surface sending water somewhere it was never meant to go, or a failing drive that has been sinking into a wet subgrade for years. Where the fix is the surface rather than the pipe, see steps, walkways and driveways, which covers permeable systems and why a driveway base has to be so much deeper than a patio base.

Book a site visit

(404) 369-0989 · info@oakavelandscape.com · book a free site visit