L-06.DR · Drainage
French drains, catch basins, downspout tie-ins and swales. Georgia clay does not drink water — it holds it, and every terrace, wall and lawn on this list lasts exactly as long as the water under it is managed.
See it built
Rome sits where the Etowah and the Oostanaula become the Coosa, and the low ground around those rivers behaves accordingly. But the drainage problems on most Floyd County properties are not river problems. They are clay problems, and they happen on high ground too.
Clay has almost no infiltration rate. Water that lands on it either runs off or sits, and on a lot that was graded by a builder to get a certificate of occupancy rather than to manage a decade of storms, what it usually does is sit. Against a foundation, in the low corner of the back yard, or in a sheet across the one flat area anyone wanted to use.
This is the trade that makes every other trade on this list last. A terrace, a wall, a lawn and a planting bed all have the same failure mode, and it is standing water. Drainage is usually the least visible line on an estimate and the one that protects everything above it.
It starts by finding where the water actually comes from, which is frequently not where it ends up. Roof area is the biggest single contributor on most properties, and a downspout discharging at the corner of the house is putting the entire roof plane into one spot of clay.
Downspouts get collected and piped away from the structure rather than splashed next to it. That single change solves a surprising share of wet-basement and soggy-corner complaints on its own.
Where water has to be intercepted across a surface, catch basins and surface drains go in at the low points and tie into the same system. Where it has to be intercepted below ground, a French drain is trenched with perforated pipe in stone and wrapped, running at a consistent fall.
Every pipe has to daylight somewhere, at a low point on the property or into an appropriate outfall. This is the part unqualified work gets wrong: a French drain that fills but never empties is a buried reservoir.
Where the answer is surface shaping rather than pipe, a swale is cut to carry water across the property at a grade that moves it without scouring, and stabilised so it does not become a channel.
Quoted by the linear foot for pipe runs, with basins, tie-ins and outfall work priced as their own items.
The biggest variable is the run: how far the water has to travel to reach somewhere it can legitimately be released, and how much fall there is to work with. A property with a low corner fifty feet from the problem is straightforward. A flat lot where the nearest outfall is at the front of the house is a much longer trench.
Then what the trench has to go through and under. Existing terrace, driveway, irrigation, established roots and utilities all add time. Rock adds more.
Diagnosis is worth paying for. Guessing at a drainage problem and installing pipe in the wrong place is the most expensive version of this work.
A French drain that stopped working after two years, because the pipe was laid without a filter fabric and the stone silted up with clay fines.
A pipe with no fall, or with a low spot in the run, holding water permanently and doing nothing during a storm.
A drain that discharges three feet from where it collected, moving the puddle rather than removing it, or one that quietly discharges onto a neighbour.
And the most common of all: a yard that was regraded and sodded to hide a water problem nobody addressed. It looks solved for one season.
Where this work leads
Quoted by the linear ft, line by line, after a site walk. Across 21 counties from the shop in Floyd County.