Yard Drainage & Leveling in Buna, TX

Yard Leveling & Drainage Services in Buna, TX

The drive is often the worst neighbor a Buna yard has. A gravel drive with no crown and no turnouts collects every drop that lands on it and carries it downhill in a single stream. Where the drive reaches the house, that stream spills into the yard, cuts a rut along the edge of the lawn, and leaves sand and gravel wherever it slows down. Fixing the yard without fixing the drive means doing it twice. This page covers the two together: turning water off the drive before it gets to the house, then leveling and shaping the yard so it handles what still reaches it.

Buna sits on Highway 96 at the southern edge of the Big Thicket, where the piney woods take over from the coastal plain. Tracts are big, much of the acreage is timber or hunting ground, and commercial forestry has been through most of it at least once. The ground has real fall, and the drainages off this country run south toward the Neches. The soils carry equipment and drain better than the heavy Gulf Coast clay south of us, but they move once the cover is off. Water given a smooth, bare line to follow, whether a drive, a skid trail, a road cut or a wheel track across the lawn, picks up speed and starts cutting. On tracts that have gone years without attention, that cutting is often well along before anybody notices, and Harvey in 2017 and Imelda in 2019 both put enough water through this country to speed it up. Many house sites up here were cut out of the woods, so the yard often ends at a tree line. The leaf litter and pine straw along that edge are worth keeping as cover rather than raking bare, since they hold the soil where grass struggles in the shade. The creek bottoms and low drainages below many house sites stay wet and carry wetland character. They are best left alone, and yard work stops where they start. Distance is part of the local picture too. Bringing a machine twenty-seven miles on a lowboy costs the same whether it works a morning or a week, so the sensible way to do yard work up here is usually alongside a drive repair, a pad, clearing or other ground work on the same place.

The walk follows the water from the top of the drive to the bottom of the yard. Where does the drive shed? Where does the road ditch spill onto the property? Which part of the lawn takes the stream, and where does it finally leave? The levels are shot along that path, because the fix belongs where the water is gathered, not only where the damage shows. On the drive, the job is to give water a way off before it builds. A crown sheds rain to both sides, and turnouts at intervals lead it off into the woods on a gentle grade, so no single stream reaches the house. Turnout outlets are spread onto vegetation rather than dumped on bare ground, which would only start a new gully downhill. Where a drainage has to pass under the drive, a culvert is set at the right flowline as ditch and culvert work. Sometimes the water starts at the road. Where the road ditch spills onto the property at the entrance, the culvert under the drive is the first place to look, since a crushed or silted pipe there sends road water straight down the drive. Resetting it is ditch and culvert work, and on a county road the county's requirements for that crossing apply. In the yard, washed ruts and the hollows they feed are filled in compacted lifts and capped with topsoil. The lawn is shaped with a gentle fall spread across its width, so water sheets over the grass instead of collecting in a line, and the ground around the house falls away on every side with the finished grade kept below the siding. Where higher ground behind the house sends water down onto the yard, a broad, shallow swale along the uphill side catches it and carries it around. Cover finishes the job. On this soil, bare graded ground left through a wet spell will wash, so topsoil goes on and seed, sod or mulch follows quickly. Brush cleared from the yard edge is mulched, hauled, or burned only within TCEQ outdoor burning rules and the county's position at the time. 811 marks the buried lines before digging, the septic field is found and kept clear, and fill and topsoil are delivered as part of the job.