With all of the rain yesterday and today in Houston, I discovered the side of my house does not properly drain water and causes pretty bad standing water issues. I then realized what the problem is. My neighbor has put pavers along his entire side of his house which pushes all of the water from his backyard into my backyard. Now I need to get a drainage system installed. Any suggestions on the type of drainage system that would best fix my issue?

neighbor's backyard


my backyard

Higher pavers that direct the water back the other way? That'll learn 'em.

A good but not cheap French drain to a few feet past your gate into the front yard should work.

French drain is your best bet. It can be done fairly inexpensively if you are willing to dig it and install yourself. You can buy 10 ft sections of 4" pvc pipe and drill holes along one side of it. Put down a bed of gravel in bottom of trench, Wrap pipe in drain cloth (holes facing down) then cover with gravel. You can then cover back with dirt/sod or jut fill in with rock. Either way should work fine. Just make sure you slope the trench a bit to prevent standing water and have a good exit point for the discharge.

I am facing a similar issue as my neighbor installed gutters and put spout extensions and pointed them at my house. Now I get all their discharge to an area that already drained poorly. Before the storms this weekend i bought some flex pipe for gutters and installed it on their spouts to direct away from my house. (Neighbors are renting and owner lives out of town, so they didn't mind when I told them my plan as gutters were being installed)

My goal is to build a French drain but direct it to my vegetable garden and have it stop underneath and soak into the ground. Through a pipe with holes on top/side and bottom. Not sure if it will work, but I'm gonna try.

Damn they build houses close to each other these days

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French drain is your best bet. It can be done fairly inexpensively if you are willing to dig it and install yourself. You can buy 10 ft sections of 4" pvc pipe and drill holes along one side of it. Put down a bed of gravel in bottom of trench, Wrap pipe in drain cloth (holes facing down) then cover with gravel. You can then cover back with dirt/sod or jut fill in with rock. Either way should work fine. Just make sure you slope the trench a bit to prevent standing water and have a good exit point for the discharge.

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This is very much the correct answer. It'll probably cost ~$500 overall and take 1 or 2 days. I'd suggest a few tweaks:

1) Go outside right now, while it's till full of water. Put 3 stakes into the ground (north, middle, south), and run a string line at exactly the water elevation right now. This will give you a perfect level line to measure down from.
2) Rent a trencher. Get one with a 12" wide bucket, and dig an 18" deep trench that in the middle of the low spot, extending a few fee outside the fence. You'll need the pipe to go out to the curb in front.
3) Put down a layer of geotextile fabric, then put in 2-3" of pea gravel. Measure down from your level line so that you can tell it drains the correct direction. Rake it until it drains. ie: 8" deep at the high end, 12" in the middle, 16" at the low end.
4) Drop in one of these guys on the high end: http://www.lowes.com/pd_508023-676-L1200DGGKIT___?productId=50053663&pl=1&Ntt=catch+basin . In later years, you're going to need this to run a shop vac through and pull out all the sediment when the drain gets clogged (ALL French drains eventually gets clogged). Mine doesn't have one, and I wish I'd have done it.
5) wrap a perforated 4" HDPE (or 4" PVC as SouldSlave describes) with holes in it in the same fabric, and drop it in. If using cement, you'll definately want to actually glue the pipe.
6) Fill the rest of the trench with pea gravel, and then wrap that geotextile fabric over the top, like this:

7) cover with a square of sod.
8) Every other year, pop the top off of your catch basin and vacuum the silt out of the bottom.

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Damn they build houses close to each other these days

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Yes. Yes. they do...

also you need to consider where it will drain out to. Obviously the best option is to drain out at the street. Make sure you have enough fall out to the discharge point. I think a 1/8" per foot is adequate.

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also you need to consider where it will drain out to. Obviously the best option is to drain out at the street. Make sure you have enough fall out to the discharge point. I think a 1/8" per foot is adequate.

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I suggest you drain it into your neighbors yard since he was the first ******* in all this. Gotta be a bigger one to show him whos boss.

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Damn they build houses close to each other these days

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No kidding, my first thought as well. Also makes it tough to get a machine in there to dig the trench. Might be all manual, don't forget to get buried lines marked!

How often does it do this? Once a year? I wouldn't stress about it.

not to mention that collection of water immediately touching your fence is going to rot that fence out quicker.

Is it common for neighbors to share the expense of drainage since it can benefit both sides or is that commonly a per neighbor expense?

If you can work that out amicably, I'd say "Great!". More often that not, it doesn't work out well.

I'd say that it's un-common nowadays for neighbors to share anything really.

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How often does it do this? Once a year? I wouldn't stress about it.

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The area stays pretty muddy for awhile after any significant rain and has small amounts of standing water so its a little worrisome.

I case you are interested, what your neighbor is doing is illegal and it is his/her responsibility to make sure the water drains to the public way and NOT across the property line..

It has been my experience that if you bury perforated sections of 4" PVC pipe and place them at the bottom of the trench and then allow the gravel to fill up the remainder of the trench with or without a sod covering, the french drain will not require a plastic mil liner an "inlet" and will collect all along the french drain. The entire PVC and gravel trench must have some fall (1/8" is perfect) to some point where it can flow freely either onto lower grass or into the street. The perforated PVC pipe also helps preclude the gravel from becoming clogged over time and failing to drain as intended.

I have used this process many times in several homes with great success and not very costly. In fact, without sodding over, the gravel becomes a nice walkway I have actually buried the pvc pipe in gravel and then placed stone or concrete blocks as stepping stones over them too in some applications.. Granted a bit of Roundup from time to time will keep the grass out of the gravel as necessary if this is the solution you choose.

Water flows down hill, and you would've gotten that from your neighbor, pavers or not. Surface drainage in the form of a swale (sexy word for ditch) is much cheaper than a French drain and if your lot will support it should work adequately.

Save the French Drain for when you really need it as it's your last line of defense and remember that all drainage solutions must be implemented incrementally and evaluated for effectiveness before sinking more time and money into the effort.

My neighbor in my last house did something similar. Put in a bunch of beds and directed the water to drain in my yard. We did a bunch of work in our backyard (pool, beds, etc) and put in several drains.

When they were digging the drains out to the road and I was out front the neighbor walked over and said they were excited about "our" new drains and how they could direct some water into it.

As much as I wanted to pop off on him I didn't and took the opportunity to talk to him about how they have runoff directed onto my property and they need to put drains in themselves. They ended up doing just that.

In hindsight I honestly don't know if they were really that dumb or just acting dumb but in the end after a conversation, albeit a bit awkward at times, they did the right thing.

Can you cite the statute for that? I've looked several times before and always come up empty. I'd love to be able to quote chapter and verse for it.

It is a provision in State Law. I don't have a specific citation off-hand. If you want, and inspector can come out and red-tag the neighbor for it.

As RTT said, it's a state law or provision about not putting water on your neighbor's property.

One website...

http://realestate.findlaw.com/neighbors/water-damage-and-neighbor-disputes.html

2nd...

http://texaswater.tamu.edu/water-law

Under the 2nd link look at the Drainage Water section.

"Common Enemy Rule", "Natural Flow Rule", and "Reasonable Flow Rule" are not legally enforceable statutes. If you sue, you're going to have to site an exact, written statute complete with a paragraph or line number.

I usually get told that this "it is your responsibility to make sure that that water doesn't drain across the property line" bit is in Texas Administrative Code but I've never found it. Would love to read it.

I'm not saying this doesn't exist, or that it's legal or illegal, just that I want to see the exact statute. I've even asked my lawyer friends and none of them could find it either.

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"Common Enemy Rule", "Natural Flow Rule", and "Reasonable Flow Rule" are not legally enforceable statutes. If you sue, you're going to have to site an exact, written statute complete with a paragraph or line number.

I usually get told that this "it is your responsibility to make sure that that water doesn't drain across the property line" bit is in Texas Administrative Code but I've never found it. Would love to read it.

I'm not saying this doesn't exist, or that it's legal or illegal, just that I want to see the exact statute. I've even asked my lawyer friends and none of them could find it either.

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The City of Houston can order compliance and issue citations.

Ok. I'll ask a lawyer buddy if he knows the statue.

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Ok. I'll ask a lawyer buddy if he knows the statue.

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Just call Code Enforcement at 832-394-9000 and ask them. You don't have to provide a location.

Oh, nah not for me.

This is sort of a side discussion now.

Spoke to the neighbor this afternoon about my concerns with his pavers and how it is affecting my yard. Even showed him the picture of my yard in the OP. He acted surprised about the amount of water in my yard and said he had installed a French drain when he had his house built. I mentioned I was looking into getting french drains myself and he offered to allow my contractor tie my drainage system into his pipes to save me on the costs of the project by me not having to install new drainage pipes going to the street

Im happy with the outcome. He was pretty cool about the situation luckily.

Good to hear; you've got a great neighbor then. Want to trade?

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Damn they build houses close to each other these days

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I've seen houses built this close from every decade for the last 100 years..
So what do you mean 'These days'??

Agreed....5 foot building line on the sides has been pretty much standard for years for your average development.

Glad to see it work out well. I've seen too many instances where it did not end well.

Called the number, and got sent to residential planning.

They couldn't answer the question, and seemed like they didn't know what I was talking about.