Hi,

I apologize ahead of time, that this post is so long. I am confused and not sure how to describe my problem, and I'm over my head in this situation, so please excuse me.

We have a small cape with a detached one car garage. There is an alley between the house and garage that is about 5 feet wide and runs 21 feet from the front of the house to the back. It is on the North side of the house.

We are trying to renovate this area because it is overrun with Sensitive fern and violas. We ripped out the plants today and we had to remove 5 wheelbarrels of soil because it was too high in places. The garage is not on a full foundation and in order to get below the shingles, it is lower than the soil level against the house. Which I guess is okay, better than lower on the house side. But really it had almost what looked like a small berm in two places about midway between the house and garage, so that was the reason we took out so much soil.

My questions are...first, that I think we should slope the soil away from the house slightly, is that correct? I also considered that I might be channeling the water toward the garage, which I am not sure is a good idea or not. Since there is no foundation, I guess that wouldn't be a problem. Also the garage side has no gutter, so the rain falls directly off the roof and we have a trench of gravel and small rocks just under the roofline. So the slope would direct water and it would end up in that gravel trench, is that right?

If it is not a good idea to slope it to the garage, then I thought another idea was to slope both from the garage and house toward the middle. But to do that we would have to dig out a lot of soil to make the middle lower than the level we have to start with on the garage side. So that doesn't seem practical.

We have not had any water problems or water coming in on that side of the house. So whatever way it was before we started working on it seemed to work okay. I am not trying to correct a problem, but just don't want to create one.

The second part of the dilemma is that there is a basement window on that side. The basement window is completely above ground, but the sill was just barely above ground and on both sides of the window the soil level against the house was a little bit higher. So if we wanted to bring the level of the soil down below the window sill by about 2 or 3 inches..or even 1 inch, it would have been either level with the soil on the garage side of the alley or lower than it.

So the only thing we could figure to do, was to keep the level of soil higher against the house to slope it slightly toward the garage side but lower the soil underneath the window. This would mean we will evidently have to insert one of those metal half circles and fill with gravel below the window, just to gain that extra 2 inches under it.

We haven't finished yet. We are still in the grading stage and have quit until next weekend, but I am looking at it and not sure the slope is significant enough and nervous that if we dig out this area below the window just to get that extra 2 inches and fill it with gravel, that we will actually attract water to run in that direction.

I really know very little about grading. The only thing I am sure of is that the ground should slope away from the house foundation and that wherever the low spot is, that is where the water will go.

I also don't know if there will be a problem this week if it rains, since we have altered the terrain, left a small hole in front of the window and pulled all the plants out that were probably holding the soil or absorbing some of the water.

We also have an electrical outlet on that side of the house and we use it for an electric lawnmower, so I am planning on installing stepping stones and shade plants when we are finished.

That is the best I can do describing our dilemma and hoping that it is simpler than I am making it. [g] Anyone that could help me understand a little better what I am doing, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

pm2