This may or may not work in your case, but I'll throw it out there. You could raise the grade so that it pitches away from the house and sheds water onto the drive or walk (convex). You can sod around a portion of the space so that you can cut a nice shaped bed that does not have to relate to the hardscape. Just don't make it so narrow that the grass looks like an add on. If the downspout is situated in a way that you can add a piece or two to the bottom to redirect it out to where it can runoff, it would help. If you need a channel to make it flow without the baggage of an extended pipe, you could do that with some river rock. The trick is to raise the area high enough to keep the swale that the river rock fills higher than the surrounding hardscape so that it does not hold the water where it meets the walk. The top of the river rock can match the surrounding grade of the bed and/or lawn.

les917 - you are the sweetest thing ever and I think you need to move to my neighborhood to be my personal shopper!!! LOL We have a Tuesday Morning a few miles away, I wonder if they carry the same items from store to store. And I am completely addicted to this forum and would be lost without it!! I was just reading back to the thread in which people were voting on which wallpaper to choose for my room, and you had mentioned (and others agreed with you) that I needed to get bedding that would balance out the colors in the paper. You had posted a really pretty JC Penney bedding set in that thread is simply gorgeous but because I have my heart set on solid colors I am getting stuck on that and feeling discouraged...I really wanted solid color linens but just struggling as to what direction I should go. I am not opposed to introducing another pattern in the room, but really don't think I am talented enough to pick the right thing. The only patterns that I am thinking will work are ginghams or stripes (and I hate stripes). LOL

Not just a plan of the kitchen. A plan of the whole floor the kitchen is on - drawn to-scale on graph paper. Posting just the kitchen doesn't give us enough context or information to plan a good kitchen with good relationships to adjacent rooms and with functional traffic patterns between them. It also makes it impossible to see if there is space to steal or opportunities for kitchen improvement available in adjacent areas.

Can you stand in the yard and take a picture? Hard to see what options are for changes from these photos.