Yard Leveling & Drainage in Groves, TX

Yard Leveling & Drainage Services in Groves, TX

On a Groves lot the lawn is rarely the only surface. There is a driveway down one side, a walk to the front door, a patio out back, maybe a pad for the trash cans, and the neighbor's drive a few feet past the fence. Every one of those is a hard edge, and over the years the ground beside them shifts while the concrete stays where it was poured. The result is water standing in long strips beside a driveway, a pond where the patio meets the grass, and a front yard that holds rain because the walk works like a curb. Getting water off a yard like that is a matter of inches and routes, and this page covers how it is done on the tight lots of this town.

Groves lies between Port Neches and Port Arthur in Mid-County Jefferson County, and it is about as fully built as towns in this area get. Lots are modest, houses are close together and there is little vacant ground. The older streets were orchard and farm ground before they were neighborhoods, so the soil under them is mostly natural clay rather than fill. It is the swelling, shrinking Gulf Coast kind, though, and decades of it moving under drives and walks show in the cracked and tilted concrete around town. Concrete and clay move differently. A driveway slab rides up and down as one piece, while the lawn beside it heaves in a wet winter and shrinks in a dry summer. Add years of mowing, edging, mulch and thatch, and the lawn edge ends up higher than the concrete, turning the drive into a channel, or lower, turning the joint into a trench. Either way, water follows the edge instead of crossing it. The town is flat, so there is little fall to spend on the fix. Water has to get from the back of a lot to the street, often through a side yard only a few feet wide, and from there the street ditch and the local system carry it toward Taylor Bayou. Rita and Ike, then Harvey and Imelda, all put water across Mid-County, and many ditches and culverts here still carry silt from those storms.

Space decides the machine. Gate width, side yard width, overhead service drops, low limbs and the neighbor's fence are all measured at the estimate, and on most lots here the right tool is a compact excavator that fits through the gate and works without tearing up the drive or the sod it crosses. It is slower than a dozer, and it is the right trade on a lot this size. The levels come next. We shoot the slab, the drive, the walks, the patio and the street ditch, because in a yard boxed in by concrete the hard surfaces set the heights everything else has to meet. The question is where water can cross out of the lawn: a gap between the patio and the fence, the end of the drive, a side yard that reaches the street. Along a drive or walk where the lawn has grown higher than the concrete, the edge is cut back so water can run onto the hard surface and down to the street, or the strip beside it is shaped into a slight swale that carries water past the concrete instead of along it. Where the lawn has sunk below the concrete, the low strip is filled in compacted lifts and topsoiled to sit just under the edge, never above it. Around the patio and the house, the ground is shaped away from the slab on every side, with the finished grade kept below the weep holes and siding. The back yard then gets a continuous fall to its outlet, which on many lots here is the side yard. That strip is often the narrowest and flattest on the property, so it is shaped as a broad, shallow swale and checked by instrument from end to end, since one flat stretch is enough to stop it working. Low spots elsewhere are filled and compacted rather than just topdressed, and capped with topsoil for the grass. Locates come first, and on the older streets the yard is also walked for private lines: sprinkler pipe, downspout drains, the sewer cleanout. If the drive or patio itself has settled so badly that it holds water on its own surface, that is a job for a concrete contractor, and you are told so rather than having the lawn bent to suit it. If the front ditch or culvert is silted, that is checked and quoted too. Nothing is sent onto the lot next door.