Not at all, that's what we are here for :-) On your feet--- fine! Many people tried to dissuade me from using this surface for that reason, but done properly it feels just fine on the feet. Because we have snakes and spiders I usually wear garden clogs when I am out there working though. Stones are more in a range from a quarter inch to inch an a half. There is no epoxy, the process is this:. Concrete, at least two inches, is poured over your existing surface. Then pebbles are dumped in it and mixed with big spreaders (squeegee looking things) until they are pretty evenly distributed. Then they kind of disappear. Within eight hours (I may have that wrong, mind, my memory...) someone comes back with a pressure washer and "knocks down" the top crust of the drying concrete to expose the aggregate just under the surface. Then it just all dries in place. They come back and make construction cuts for expansion after it is all hardened. I'll be honest---The draining concrete slurry off this project is a huge mess, it has to go somewhere and if it gets out in the yard and solidifies you'll have little chunks of porous concrete everywhere, so you have to further denature that liquid concrete by watering it down even more wherever the slurry ends up. A lot of it went down our existing drains and caused damage that then had to be repaired (see above). However, the contractor who did this job was a complete idiot (in addition to some things he did wrong and underestimated, he knocked down one of the brick pillars on our bridge because his truck / trailer combination was too long to make the turn off the bridge to continue on the drive and it was perfectly obvious that would happen to anyone observing the truck and turn radius with the most rudimentary knowledge of physics and geometry, not from books but just from being alive) and I would hope your contractor in Fla would be much better at this!

Woody it all looks so serene and peaceful absolutely lovely, a retreat from a hot summer's day. Do you have a seating area where you can just sit and enjoy? Right now we are having a June like we've never had before, June here is usually on the cool side with a lot of rain, not this year, everything is frying even with all the watering I've been doing. The flowers on the Rhodo trusses which usually fall when spent are drying crisp, as thin as tissue paper on the plant, same with the climbing roses, even with all the watering petals aren't falling, the flowers are just drying up, looks awful I hope this is not a sign of what's to come in the future. We are situated in a funny little pocket, sometimes my garden is ahead of others around here, sometimes way behind. One year we had a killing frost the end of August and did all the dahlias in while in other gardens they flourished for another couple of months. Most years we don't have a light frost until the end of October, early November. Last year we had a killing frost beginning of November right out of the blue, the weather had been so mild everything was growing merrily along and WAM! my Ayesha hydrangea really took a hit, had to cut it right back this spring so no flowers this year. But that's gardening for you sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. All in all gardens are magical places, full of joy, wondrous discoveries, contentment well maybe not when couch grass and herb robert raise their ugly heads lol, weeds and all there's no place I'd rather be. Starting on the 15th water restrictions we've NEVER had before, it looks like we might be down to hand watering in the near future, thank goodness all our rain barrels are full and capped off. On the bright side all the veggies are looking good, I mulched with a thick layer of straw before planting, fingers crossed. I ran around last night with my camera hoping to find something decent enough to post but everything just looks weary. Maybe one spot where the Campanula portenschlagiana is running rampant on the little rock wall, I'll try and take a picture later. Oh well this is the year for renovation, editing, replacing and planting something new and interesting when things cool down, hopefully next year things will look a little better. Annette

@Christopher CNC Thanks for the response!! I actually grew up in the countryside and 100% agree that the things the city does is weeeeeird!!!! lol!!! We do plan on putting up a fence (there used to be a chain link fence yuck lol) but we wanted to wait in case we DO have to remove the tree (we're friends with the neighbor's thankfully) and if there is a fence that would make removal a lot harder. The new garage is NOT a footprint of the old one :S. It is twice the size honestly XD. It's a long story but we had a contractor we were working with for a looong time (2017, insurance thingy, etc) and when he put in part of a foundation he dug a 6-8ft trench and put in AWFUL wobbly looking concrete walls. We learned later that the way he was doing it was if we were going to attach the house to the garage (we live in michigan). Needless to say those ended up being removed. There is no pooling we have come across in the backyard itself so far! Everything seems to be following the path of the driveway. Thanks again for responding! :D

The way people use the term "French drain" today makes it not any different than any underground drain. An underground drain pipe is useful when you must translocate water from one low point of the yard to an even lower point elsewhere in the yard and have to pass through a higher elevation area along the way. But if all along the route, at the surface, you need to be collecting and translocating water, then an underground drain is not helpful. What you need is surface drainage: slope, swale and/or flume. The exit point in your yard for drainage water is the ditch. And the water needs to get to it, along any point, using one of those 3 devices. It's not necessary to worry about every square inch of the yard. Out in the wooded portion, if the yard is juicy and sloppy for a day or two after the rain, does it really make a material difference? Probably not. What's likely to matter most is the area all around the house, the drive and the storage building and access to it. Mainly, you need to be evaluating how you can get water from the left side of your yard to the right side, where the ditch is. It looks like the biggest problem you're showing us is standing water in front of the storage building. It would help if that building was raised up a few, like 6 inches. If it's sitting on the ground, you could raise the grade with soil, gravel or by pouring a concrete slab (if the building needed a solid floor.) Also, the approach ground in front of the storage building needs to be raised, with a slight cross-slope tilted rightward. From that point on, you could create a swale between the building and the trees and the trees and fence. The bottom of the swale would be continuously gradually descending in elevation as it travels toward the ditch ... roughly about 2 1/2" to 3" per every ten feet. The swale profile can be gentle. Establish the bottom center of it first (like a channel) and then carve out the sides to make it blend more gently into the surrounding grade. If the space is really tight between the trees and fence, then you may need a flume ... a concrete lined channel. Think of it as a splash block (like would be below a downspout) but that runs the entire length of the channel. The reason it's concrete because water is moving faster in it that it would be swale, so it can erode the ground. I looked on Youtube but couldn't find any videos about making a drainage flume. Usually, they are just hand plaster in by some grandpa. A poor man's flume could be made by lining a channel with roofing shingles oriented the same way they would shed water on a roof.