So, my barn is on the down slope of a hill. Barn is not currently level. Barn went up before dirt was brought in. Don’t ask. So now dirt is going to be brought in, but is it still going to flood? If I level the inside of the barn, is the water not just going to make a path through the new dirt and still flood? I’ve been told no, that the new, taller dirt will make the water run around the barn. Do I need to build a ditch outside of the barn to guide the water? I’m over my barn flooding. My horses don’t live in it, but they still need to come in it to eat and the mud makes me angry! I hope this is a good explanation. Please help!!
Dirt vs. water, water wins. (Hell, rock vs. water and water wins–it just takes longer.) French drains are a likely solution. Spend money now and do it right because after you put the dirt in it will cost that much more to go back and redo it.
Mr. subk does construction and development and he will tell you the smartest thing he ever did was put french drains around our barn to pull water away. (I think he is stretching the truth but he swears not.) 18" of rain in one weekend and I had no mud, so he might be right.
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Your question depends on how significant the slope is, where else the water can run off to, and other factors.
We bought our farm a little over a year ago and discovered the same issue. The slope of our hill is very small, but any significant rain (2+ inches in a few hours) would flood all of the stalls in the barn. It was draining off in a river into the end stall, and being sand ground it would soak into the other stalls if it kept raining.
We put in a french drain on the back (high) side of the barn that the water was coming from. Helped a smidge.
We put in gutters on the same side of the barn. Helped a smidge.
We built up the stalls by six inches with limerock and concrete screenings and they’ve been bone dry ever since, even through a Florida summer of rain.
I’m fortunate to have a father who knows how to do literally everything who helped me through this process. If you don’t have such a resource, it’s probably best to pay an expert come in to figure out what needs to be done.
I think a combination of the French drain and building up with rock are going to be my best bet! Digging a trench has helped in the past, so I think the drain will help! Thank you! It looks like the drain will actually be rather cheap to install as well. From what I gather, it’ll be under $200!
I dug the run off drainage ditch just this fall. Not for a barn, but for a paddock. AND added material to the paddock to raise it. And added the railway ties to build the dam, to help to influence the path of the draining water AROUND the paddock instead of through it. So by April, I will be able to tell you if it all worked. But the raging river that has run through that paddock in the spring (spring run off from the melting snow on the hayfield behind the paddock- the ground is still frozen underneath) was just not acceptable, any more. I hope I dug that ditch deep enough.
When I moved into my house it was during a drought. The previous owners pulled out all the overgrown shrubs from around the foundation of the house. About a month after we moved in we got rain as in a few inches an hour for a few hours. The basement flooded, mostly through the window wells. I was out in the back yard digging trenches in the rain to divert the water around the house. Behind our house and up the hill from us were corn fields. The water was just pouring off the hillside right towards the house. The ground was too dry and concrete like to absorb the water. For the next number of rains we would get water up into the sump pumps.
The long term fix was to build the gardens around the house back up. When they removed the plants it angled things so the water ran and pooled against the foundation. We also added plants back in most of the way around the house.
We created what we call moats along the back of the yard that gently collect the water and send it around the house. They are not ditches or trenches as much as big wide low spots that we can still easily mow.
There used to be an area in the back yard that water would pool in that would be almost knee deep for about an hour or so after a heavy rain. (My lab loved it). The pool did not touch the foundation. We recontoured that area so there was no longer a basin and tied it into the moat system.
The basement has been dry for the last 13 years since we did the modifications to the terrain. No french drains not sharp deep ditches just gently sloping wide low areas to direct the water.
DH would go out in the middle of heavy rain to see where the water was wanting to run and he would dig trenches while it was raining to make sure it was being redirected away from the foundation and where he wanted. When it stopped raining he would then widen the trench and smooth it out.
We really wanted to make sure that we did not have to weed eat the moats. We made them wide, gently sloped so that the mower wouldn’t scalp the edges and there were no trip hazards.
DH only had to tweek the initial recontouring of the basin once after the intial work. He hadn’t gotten it quite right the first time. We used sod rather than seed and the sod took up a little too much depth in one area. This was mostly in the fenced back yard where the dogs could go out. Sod seemed the easier way to quickly control mud.
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