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Standing water, dying plants, a slope washing out: find the line that sounds like your yard and go straight to the guide that covers it. Every Carolina Piedmont clay, drainage and planting guide we have published, sorted by problem rather than by date.

Three contractors walk the same job. Three numbers come back, and they are nowhere near each other. The instinct at that point is to work out which one is honest. Usually that is the wrong question. In my experience the spread is rarely about honesty and rarely about efficiency. It is that the three of them quoted three different jobs, because nobody wrote down which job it was. I write quotes for a living, so I am describing this from the side that produces the numbers rathe

There is a category of household job that gets filed under cleaning and is actually maintenance. It looks like tidying, it feels like tidying, and skipping it does not cost you anything visible for about four years. Then it costs a lot at once. These are the five I would put at the top of that list. None of them are difficult. All of them are on the outside of the house or the back of an appliance, which is exactly why they get missed — almost every cleaning schedule ever wri

Most disappointing garden beds are not a plant problem or a soil problem. They are an arithmetic problem that nobody did. Someone stands in a garden centre, looks at a bed they have in their head, and buys what looks about right. Sometimes that is forty plants for a space that wanted twenty-one, and the bed is a thicket in year three. More often it is twelve for a space that wanted twenty-one, and the bed looks thin and weedy for two seasons while everything fills in. Both ou

The keys change hands and everybody starts unpacking. It is the obvious thing to do and it is slightly the wrong order. The first week in a house is the only week you will ever have where you are looking at it with fresh eyes and no habits. Everything you find in that week is still somebody else's problem to explain. By month three, the sticking door is just how the door is, the smell in the crawl space is just the crawl space, and the downspout that dumps beside the wall is

There is one page in every home maintenance system that does more good than all the others combined, and it is the page everybody leaves blank. It is not the seasonal checklist. It is the boring one at the front: the model numbers, the filter sizes, the paint codes, and where the shut-offs actually are. Nobody fills it in because nothing about it is urgent. That is exactly the point. The value of that page is realised at 11pm on a Sunday, in the dark, usually with water invol

You asked three contractors for a price on the same wet back yard. One came back at a figure, one came back at roughly double, and one came back at four times the first. Nobody is necessarily lying. In our experience they are usually quoting three different jobs, and the quotes do not say so anywhere. This is not a list of questions to ask on site — we have written that one already. This is about the piece of paper afterwards, and how to lay three of them side by side so the

This is one of the most emotionally charged calls we take, and it is worth separating the three different questions inside it, because they have different answers and only one of them is ours. Before anything else: nothing in this post is legal advice, and it is not written by a lawyer. If there is damage, or a dispute that has hardened, the person you need is a North Carolina attorney who handles property matters. What follows is a description of the landscape so you know wh

If we could persuade every homeowner in Union County to do exactly one thing, it would be this one, and it is not a job we would be paid for. Start with the volume, because nobody believes it One inch of rain on a square foot of roof produces about 0.623 gallons. That is the whole calculation; everything else is multiplication. 1,200 sq ft roof, one inch of rain: about 748 gallons 2,000 sq ft roof, one inch of rain: about 1,247 gallons 2,400 sq ft roof, one inch of rain: abou

This question comes up on nearly every quote, and the honest answer is that it depends on four things: how much ground you are disturbing, whether water or a buffer is involved, where the work sits relative to a right-of-way, and what your particular county and municipality require on top of state law. What follows is a map of where to ask. It is not a determination for your property, because that is not something a blog post can do. The state threshold North Carolina's Sedim

Erosion is the one drainage problem that compounds. Most water problems sit at roughly the same severity year after year until somebody addresses them. Erosion does not. It accelerates, and the cost of fixing it rises far faster than the damage looks like it should. There are four recognisable stages. Knowing which one you are looking at tells you almost everything about urgency. Stage one: sheet erosion What it looks like: no channel at all. Soil moving as a thin film. You n

If you own land in parts of Union or Mecklenburg County and there is a stream on it, there is a reasonable chance a protected riparian buffer applies — and a buffer governs what you may cut, grade, plant or build near the water. People find out about this at two moments: when they are planning work, which is the good version, and when somebody notices work that has already happened, which is not. What the rule covers The Goose Creek watershed sits in the Yadkin-Pee Dee River

The pipe under your driveway is the most consequential piece of drainage on a rural property and the one nobody thinks about until it fails. When it blocks, water does not stop. It finds the next lowest route, which is usually across the drive, and then you are repairing the drive as well as clearing the pipe. The rule, on a state-maintained road North Carolina's administrative code is specific. Driveway pipe installed in the state right-of-way is restricted to a minimum insi

A wet crawl space generates more expensive proposals than almost anything else in a house, and a good share of them solve the wrong problem. Before you buy a system, it is worth knowing which of three things you actually have, because two of them are fixed outside the house for a fraction of the cost. The three sources 1. Surface water getting in By far the most common. Roof water and yard water arrive at the foundation, soak into the settled backfill, and find their way thro

We work across Union County and the eastern edge of Mecklenburg, and the drainage problems are not the same everywhere. What shows up in Weddington, Marvin and Wesley Chapel has a particular shape to it, and it is worth understanding if you live there, because the obvious fix is often the wrong one. What these communities have in common Larger lots. Heavier clay in many places. Newer construction on ground that was pasture or woodland a relatively short time ago. And — this i

There is a particular call we get more than any other, and it goes like this: the house is four years old, it is well built, nothing is obviously wrong with it, and there is water against the foundation every time it rains hard. The owner assumes they have been unlucky or badly built. Usually neither is true. What has happened is a sequence that is entirely normal and entirely predictable. What happens to a lot before you ever see it Building a house on a Piedmont lot involve

If water stands in the same place in your yard after every meaningful rain, that is not bad luck and it is not going to resolve itself. It is information, and it is usually telling you one of three things. The three causes, and how to tell them apart Cause one: it has nowhere to go The most common by a wide margin. Water arrives at a low point and there is no route out of it. Nothing is wrong with your soil; the shape of the ground is wrong. You can confirm this in ten minute

Nobody wants to ask what it costs. Everybody wants to know. So here is the honest version, with published figures you can check yourself and an explanation of why three quotes for the same yard can differ by a factor of four without any of them being dishonest. We are not going to publish our own rates on a blog post. What a job costs depends on your ground, your access, your outlet and what is already buried out there, and a number pulled off a page you read in February is w

A contractor's pre-storm walk is twenty minutes and it decides whether Monday is a normal day or a week of rework you are not getting paid for. Written for people who run crews, not homeowners.

Almost everyone diagnoses drainage the day after, when the evidence has drained away. The useful information exists only while it is raining, and collecting it takes ten minutes, a coat, and a phone.

You are inside the seeding window, the seed is down, and one to two inches of rain is forecast. Whether that is the best thing that could happen or the worst depends almost entirely on your slope and how hard the surface was when you spread it.