Lake Muirkirk

Well, a few weeks back it started raining and we noticed a puddle starting to form in our front lawn. It was where we had our driveway form a runoff so we didn't get water flooding our garage. The good news is, that runoff area works great, and no water in or in front of the garage. The bad news is, our lawn is having a hard time keeping up with all the rain. We drained the "puddle" with a bucket and that seemed to help. Even though it continued to rain, we didn't get water pooled back there...at least, for a while. Last week though we were having record rainfall, unkown to us. It's washington, it rains here, so we didn't really notice it was coming down extra heavy, extra long. Our "puddle" came back, and started to grow. It was dubbed "Lake Muirkirk". We decided something had to be done, so Ryan came up with an engineering scheme. First and formost, we had some gutters that were draining into splashblocks, or nothing at all. We have a gutter drain system built around the house, all the gutter water is supposed to be routed into these, but 3 of them didn't get hooked up. We figured we could wait till spring, or not have to worry about it...we were wrong. The front spouts were pretty easy. The back one took a little more thinking, but once we figured out what to do, it was pretty simple. Of course, that one will be temporary as it looks a little tacky. But it solved the puddle issue in the back, and now we can rest easy that water isn't seeping into our crawl space. Then was the issue of "Lake Muirkirk". This was a dreaded task as it meant tearing up the lawn a bit. We decided though to cut our grass into sod chunks in the path of where we would need to lay drainage pipe. This way we could just lay it back on top when we were finished. That part seemed to work out well (except for the extra 3 sod pieces that we had left over...not exactly sure how that worked out, but oh well) Ryan's use of a pickaxe made him into mud man. He was covered from head to foot. And after he got warm (even though it was raining) he took off his coat and sweatshirt, and I wouldnt let him spray mud on his white t-shirt, so that had to come off too) He wouldn't allow me to take any pictures of him, though he looked hilarous. All I got were the boots. We think the ditch worked. We layed corrigated pipe in the hole, filled her up, laid back the sod. But of course it hasn't rained since :)