French Drain Install Help

If your soil isn't too compacted or rocky, you can do it yourself pretty easily with a rented trencher from home depot.

I've always done it in this order:

- dug trench
- laid fabric
- laid PVC (with a lot of holes) wrapped in fabric as well
- Covered in rocks
- Another layer of fabric
- Sod


ETA:

I have some that are 10+ years old at my mom's house and she recently told me she had to dig a portion up for other reasons and my french drain was still in perfect shape/clear.

I saw online that the trench needs to be about a foot wide. Do trenchers do that or do they just dig up the first bit then you have to clean up?

quote:

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I saw online that the trench needs to be about a foot wide. Do trenchers do that or do they just dig up the first bit then you have to clean up?

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Similar to a tiller, it busts it up one the first pass, but you'll then be able to use a shovel to get the rest of the width pretty easy. But you really want an excavator if you're using something besides a shovel.

French Drain Man

My buddy had a couple of helpers with him. He used a flat shovel to mark the outside edges of where it needed to be dug, then dug the grass out himself before turning the digging over to his crew. They just shoveled it out between the lines he had set, to a certain depth. We used all the dirt they dug out to add around the foundation, to give it some slope down away from the house to direct it to the drain.