In article ,
Larry Jaques wrote:

No, gravel allows water to flow through it easily. It's the dirt road
underneath which needs the grading. Then a flat load of gravel on top
would be OK.

Not in Chicagoland, or anywhere else it freezes, and then rains later.
Plugs up with ice and makes a dam until springtime... and not everything
that falls once it's frozen is also conveniently frozen.

The surface grade should be below the building floor, and sloped away
from the building at least 1/8" per foot, preferably for 10-12 feet at
least. If that's impossible, you need serious drainage work - but I
suspect that Igor can just adjust the grade and come out fine, if the
building was not built to fail in the first place (ie, with a slab floor
below grade and no drains below the level of the slab floor.)

To see how your drainage can work, start where this is supposed to dump
into the street, and check that against the floor level at the far end
of the building. Inches of drop divided by feet back along the road +
feet from far side of road (where you want the water to be as it runs to
the street) tells you maximum slope available. Take the first inch and a
half going sideways as primary (1/8" per foot 12 feet out from
building), so that any water pooling pools away from the building, then
take whatever drop you have left and that's what you have left to get
water further away, and into the street drain. Toward the front of the
building, let the near side of the road drop (still keeping the whole
road sloped away from the building), and increase the slope from the
building to the road, so that the road as a whole leads water to the
street.

If you set stakes at the building (or building side of the road) every
10-20 feet, and stakes at the far side of the road (or property line,
however that works) with marks say 30" above your desired grade, it's
easy to recheck progress without a level, by running strings from the
mark at the building to the mark at the road-edge, and then sighting two
strings (for the reference plane) against a mark 30" up a rake handle.
Chalk the high spots, take down the strings, run the machine, chew the
chalked areas, recheck. At some point, just use the rake on the high
spots, dragging towards the low spots. If the grade marks are accurate,
the result will be as well.

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