Do a search for "drywell". Flo-well is a nice easy to handle drywell that is available at a lot of home centers. I used them for residential downspouts quite a bit when I did installs. They come as flat panels that snap together and form a perforated tank. There is a lid and knock outs for piping. You have to complete it by surrounding it with drain rock and fabrick to keep soil from infiltrating into the rock from the top and sides. Then you can bury it and no one will know it is there provided that it is big enough to handle the water.

My mom, a retired real estate broker, used to have a rule of thumb. She didn't like representing houses with yards that sloped toward the home. I'm not saying she wouldn't, but she reviewed them much more carefully. She lives in a city that is hilly and has many subdivisions prone to flash flooding. She simply preferred to sell houses without drainage problems. Now, the weird part is that she and Dad bought a home with a serious grading issue. It was a new home at the time and nothing had yet been done to the landscape. They had decided to walk away from this house because of the potential drainage problem, but kept coming back. The homeowner (developer) paid for a consultation with a LA and reduced the house price by the amount needed to address the problem. I don't know the percentage grade, but the ultimate fix involved a dry stone retaining wall that blends into the ground, creating upper and lower regions of level ground. The wall at its highest is about 2.5 to 3 feet? I know that the walkway from front door to upper level goes up six steps. The point is that the first 20 feet or so of front yard is sloped away from the house. It's subtle, but essential. There is a french drain (sort of an installed underground stream bed) at the base of the retaining wall which provides water with access to the street. It's a corner lot, if anyone is following this. My point, which has probably been hopelessly lost in this long story, is that slope matters. Wellspring

Sit down because I'm jumping right into some science. This is for your husband to help understand why the bridge idea is not going to help you. Normal soil has an open pore structure that allows air and water to pass through it. Inside this structure lives 10s of thousands of species of beneficial microbes which thrive on the open pore structure. These microbes are Mother Nature's invention. As it turns out the species of microbes living in swampy land are different from those living in dryish land (lawns). When you allow standing water to stand for several days, that cuts off the air flow to the beneficial microbes and their populations begin to decrease. If this happens enough, normal grass will thin out and stop growing. They will be replaced by swamp grasses like nutgrass and some others. So it is important to keep the water from pooling on your lawn. Back to the issue... If your community has an ordinance that says homeowners must drain all water from their own property and not allow it to cross over onto a neighbor's land, then all you should have to do is call your city code compliance officers and make them deal with it. If you live in the savage west, then you might have to do it yourself. Talk to your neighbors and ask them to berm up their land at the fence to keep the water on their side. Since they already dug the ditch, they are unlikely to bend to your wishes. So when that doesn't work, berm up your side of the fence and push their water back onto their property (see how they like having standing pools of water!!). Six inches of berm would normally be plenty. Planting a lawn in the spring is not the best idea, but if you really have to you have to. If you can afford sod, then that should be better, but if you were planning to seed, I would not spend a lot on seed for a spring installation. What will happen is all that new grass will find itself competing with crabgrass which also sprouts in the spring. Your grass seed will be less hardy than the crabgrass and will thin out in the summer heat. It is not uncommon to have a full crabgrass lawn by July. It is much better to seed new grass in the fall because crabgrass seed is not sprouting then. It also gives the new grass all winter and spring to develop heat tolerant roots. Now a word on forum etiquette. This is not your thread. The original poster had a problem with soil structure. Your problem is neighborhood drainage. You should have opened a new topic so people who want to help you don't have to read through someone else's problem from last year - which is really not your problem. I also suspect you will need some advice on planting your lawn (spring? or fall - either one). Now is the time to ask, so post a new topic! When you ask about planting a new lawn, please mention specifically where you live. The zone system is not good for helping with lawns, so give a town or zip code. And if you want more help on the neighborhood drainage issue, I would still post a new topic with your new questions. This forum seems to have a lot of opinions about neighbors '-)

If I were you, I wouldn't get my hopes up at ever fully waterproofing the basement. its kinda like trying to turn your basement foundation into a boat hull. People keep trying to give me tips for "waterproofing" my basement but I'm more interested in accepting that water will always eventually find its way in. So, I'm more concerned about controlling the flow of the water after it gets in. I plan on making concrete baseboard drains and line those with an impermeable barrier. I will never try to "finish" the basement. I want bare walls so that when they do degrade, I can see it and work on it. Hiding a wall with "something that looks nice" only makes repair work harder to do later on. I'd rather have an ugly basement that is easy to maintain. My basement continues to flood after heavy rains even after getting new gutters and drains installed. 12 foot drains to lead the water away from the house and the basement still floods. Accept it. Control the inevitable flow.