My soil is clay but different from yours, I expect. Here, putting gravel or rock without a barrier of some kind will indeed lead to sinking into the mud and the need to replenish the stone regularly. I have used landscape fabric which does help. In my area, I was also hoping that the fabric would prevent weeds from sprouting in the smaller colored gravel that I was using - it didn't.

Thank you! I figure landscape fabric is somewhat helpful but I know there is some debate over how effective it actually is (especially for weed prevention). I'm not as worried about weed prevention as "we'll cross that bridge when we get there" but am definitely interested in figuring out how to best 'stabilize' the ground before hardscaping it.

^ Agree. Water will sit on the ground, not on the stones, and the drain opening needs to be flush with the ground or even a tiny bit lower (with a short "collar" to keep mud from washing into it.)

Also make sure that the ground slopes away from the structure - and to the drain if possible.

When I redid my beds close to the house when we moved in I found some thick, black plastic product under the stones on top of the clay. The hosta and schrubs all had roots growing on top of the clay just under the fabric. Most fabric is not a successful weed barrier because the barrier is often breached and or the debris from trees ohter plants will eventually break down and create soil in and around your rocks. I hear your trouble trying to keep rock on top so just besure the garden cloth you choose is penetrable by water and air and won't choke out roots. Assume you will have to lift the rock, rinse it all off, apply new fabric as time goes on. I found removing the rock, allowing the plants to get so big the foliage over lap so weeds don't grow, and continuing to ammend the soil to work better than rock.

Why not cover with concrete? Get permits to cover the area and pour. Why DG? Is cost a factor?

The problem with the area on the side (with the narrow strip) is that the elevation is weird. There is a single surface area drain at the far end of the wall in the back on the other side of the heat pump - if you look closely you can barely see it right in the corner of the outside wall. It's already at the lowest point which is probably still too high :(. That piece of drain has a dedicated curb cut so we can't situate it any deeper at this point. If anytyhing, perhaps a drain grate is needed? Or maybe drilling weep/relief holes into the block wall to allow water to escape that way (we had this done at our condo as we had a similar block wall in the yard)?

The contractor who demoed this area and repoured the concrete was saying that if we leave a strip there and then put rocks, DG, or whatever, it should drain even if it drains slowly. We had very heavy rains through the night, which is why it's flooded there currently. I'll have to check again but I'm thinking/hoping it'll eventually go into the ground after a while.

A Mat, originally this alleway was fully concrete but the concrete was settling and eventually formed a "U" and water was pooling in the middle of it. Earlier on another contractor was suggesting remediating this by demoing and repouring concrete so it's graded away from the house and drains off to the side. After speaking with different contractors, all of whom indicated that adding drains in this area would present various challenges, it seemed like pouring concrete partially and leaving a foot open and filling with river rock (or whatever) would be a better way to provide relief and promote better drainage. So this is how we ended up deciding to do it this way. I still think we could probably add a grate drain but I'm not sure about the elevation, the pitch, if there is even any, is very minimal.

As far as the area up against the house, yes cost was a factor but also appearance too. We don't want it looking too 'sterile' and wanted to eventually put wooden planter boxes in front of the windows too. We don't ever intend on walking or stepping much on the area where the DG would be against the side of the house either.

We did our one area in our yard with landscape fabric and pea gravel the gravel is a boiut 5" deep and the odd weed has found its way but they pull out easily . I use big planters filled with seasonal stuff and the borders are perennials but the gravel is all around them . This coming spring will be the 3 rd one and the perennials seems very happy

You need local expertise. The expansive clay in my area would destroy your foundation and I've never seen drains that small that didn't stay clogged anywhere other than on concrete.

It sounds like one option would be to excavate a little more (down to 4"), and fill all of it with DG but to make sure to compact it in as I go...

In terms of the excavated dirt, I was thinking about just pushing it to the outside edges (or *maybe* forming some berms in places.... not so sure about this though). I figure I can kind of make a pseudo "terrace" by pushing the excess dirt up against the concrete block retainer wall (with the iron fence)... that's the area that I would planning to roughly be planting my hedge plants (mostly lemonade berries). The hope then would be to get 3-4" depth where I want to lay the DG path as well as more DG under flagstones (see the picture with the drawn out path & flagstones).

Thoughts on this approach?