"Stacia" wrote in message
...
"EXT" writes:

If you don't have a lower area to drain the water to, you may have to be
more creative to deal with the problem. You do not say where you are, the
soil type or whether you have winters to contend with, which would help to
provide a solution.

I'm in Kansas so yes, we do have winters to contend with. I couldn't
tell you the soil type, but I think we still have the topsoil if that
matters.
Someone else mentioned the house sounded like it was in the side of a
hill. It's not, but it is *on* a hill. The top of the hill is the front
yard, which slopes so that the yard near the curb is about 12 inches
higher than the yard just in front of the northeast corner of the house
where the pooling happens. The back yard continues for about 15 feet
behind the home and then ends where the hill drops at quite a steep slope.
The previous owners actually put in a pile of dirt to make a landscaping
mound in the NE corner of the front yard, which makes the grade problem
worse -- the guy who owned the house was getting a Ph.D. in landscape
architecture and should have known better.
==
The back of our house appears to be similar to your front. We have about 15
ft then a small upward hill.
We always had a standing water problem. We dug a trench with our Troybilt
tiller along the bottom of the hill all
along the back of our yard and ran it to our side yard which drains down
toward the road in front. We put gravel
down (the hardest part) then laid a plastic perf drain pipe on the gravel.
I believe we also laid down a drainage cloth that
keeps the perf pipe from filling with dirt. At the end of the trench/pipe,
we dug a larger hole and put a large plastic garbage
can in it after drilling drainage holes in the can bottom and about a foot
up the sides. We put gravel in and under the can
and covered the whole trench/can with topsoil and grass seed leaving a small
"indentation" in the center top of the trenched area. We did
this about 7 years ago and haven't had a standing water problem since. We
expected this to be a temporary solution but it's still working.
Don't know how long it will last. The tiller and a landscape rake are
critical tools for this labor intensive project, but we did it ourselves
in a few days with relatively inexpensive materials.