Rain rain

My to-do list keeps growing, but I'm getting no home or yard things accomplished. So I thought it would be a good time to look back on something that happened almost exactly a year ago. A big storm flooded our yard more than ever before. We were lucky that no lasting damage occurred, but it was scary to watch:

Another view of the swing set:

We had to dry out the shed and all the items that were on the floor of it:

It was clear that the gutters and downspouts couldn't handle the volume of water--which itself wasn't surprising given how much rained down. Rain gushed up backwards from the pipes, which was especially bad since many of them are right near the basement stairs. It's hard to see from this picture but water was flowing UP the pipe and back onto the rocks.

This caused water to pour under the door to the basement, thought fortunately we were able to wet vac it up before it spread to anything it could damage.

The downpour also showed us that there were holes in the part of the downspouts that were underground--and under the patio--where water belched up to the surface in weird places. It was one of the reasons we decided to get a new patio, to give us an opportunity to see what was underneath and also to re-level it, since all the soggy spots had produced a really uneven surface. What we found was a mishmash of different sized clay pipes, most of them clogged and some of them smashed or broken:

When we had the patio upgraded, the work crew paid attention to the pipes running under the patio, even identifying and repairing a giant hole in one. We knew this was our only chance to fix everything. They also installed a rock garden at the wettest part of our yard in the hopes that it would help move the water along. D then dug a trench though that rock garden for water to collect in when we get downpours.

So has it worked? Well we've had a few big storms since (but nothing that bad) and the yard does seem to drain better, mostly collecting in the rock garden at the far end of our backyard. And we've certainly had quite a lot of rain to test it out in:

But we know that one of our drainage pipes under the patio must have sprung a leak, because after our last heavy rain, we had a bunch of gravel on our patio, pushed up from water spurting out a pipe. It seems unlikely we'll be able to fix this so now that the new patio is installed, unfortunately.

So I guess we just brush off the gravel and hope it isn't so bad that it weakens the ground underneath it. Fingers crossed...