Yard Leveling & Drainage in Beaumont, TX

Yard Leveling & Drainage Services in Beaumont, TX

An in-town backyard is a tight place to move dirt. There is a fence on three sides and a slab on the fourth, a sprinkler system somewhere under the grass, power and cable coming in overhead or underground, and a neighbor a few feet away in every direction. Leveling one is less about horsepower than about getting a machine through the gate, putting the right material in the right hollow, and leaving the yard falling the way it should without scarring the rest of it. That is the job on this page: the residential version of our grading work, in the established neighborhoods of the city we are based in. It covers the dish by the patio that holds water for three days, the side yard that stays soft all winter, and the yard that has slowly settled until it runs toward the house.

Most of the city sits on the Beaumont Formation, a heavy clay that seals when it gets wet and cracks open when it dries. The ground is close to sea level and nearly flat, and a typical city lot has only a few inches of fall between the back fence and the street. Those inches do all the work, since this clay lets almost nothing soak in. Water leaves across the surface or it stays. The older neighborhoods were graded once, when the houses went up, and plenty has happened to those yards since. Clay pulls back from the slab edge in a dry summer and swells against it in a wet winter. Trenches for sewer, gas and sprinkler lines settle into shallow lines across the lawn. A neighbor adds a patio or a raised bed along the fence, and water that used to cross that line now stops against it. The 2017 and 2019 floods, Harvey and then Imelda, left silt in yards and street ditches across Jefferson County, and many lawns have not been reshaped since. Once water leaves a city yard it joins the street, the storm system and Jefferson County Drainage District 6 channels running to the Neches or Taylor Bayou. Toward Pine Island Bayou on the north side the lots get bigger and the ground has a little more fall. To the south it has almost none. Equipment reaches most neighborhoods in a short run along Interstate 10 or Highway 69, which keeps a small backyard job from carrying a long haul in its price.

A backyard job here starts at the gate. We measure it, look at what is overhead and check the route from the driveway to the work, because a machine that fits the yard but not the gate means taking down a section of fence, and that gets agreed before the day rather than discovered on it. 811 is called for the gas, power, water and cable lines, and then we look for what the locators will not mark: sprinkler lines and heads, a buried downspout pipe, the sewer cleanout, an old clothesline footing. Then the grade gets shot, from the slab to wherever the water can leave. On a city lot that is usually the street, a side yard running to the front, or a ditch along the back line. The numbers decide the job. If the yard has an inch or two of fall in the right direction and a couple of hollows interrupting it, the work is filling those hollows and blending them in. If the yard runs toward the house, it is a regrade: high ground along the back cut and moved, the ground against the slab built up and shaped away, and the whole surface tied into the outlet. Fill goes into a hollow in thin lifts, compacted each time, because a dish filled loose in one go settles back into a dish by next summer. On this clay the body of the fill can be good clay, and the top few inches are topsoil so the grass has something to root in. Where the existing topsoil is decent it comes off first and goes back on top. Along the house, the finished surface stays below the brick ledge, the weep holes and the bottom of the siding, so the fix does not hold moisture against the wall. Two cautions apply to most lots in town. The side yard between two houses is often the only way out for the backyard's water, and it is often the narrowest, flattest strip on the lot, so a shallow grassed swale there can do more good than anything done in the back. And the water leaving your yard cannot be aimed at the house next door. If the only fall on the lot runs across a neighbor's yard, that is talked through with you before any dirt moves. When the yard is shaped it is left ready for grass, seeded or sodded. Bare clay in a Gulf Coast summer bakes hard and sheds the first storm in rills, so the sooner it is covered the better it holds.