when is a drain not a drain?

When it's a layered salad.

In the olden days of yore, you dug a deep trench around your house, or maybe only along two sides, and placed a series of thick ceramic pipes along it. Then you covered it with soil, and maybe, if you were really keen, connected the eavestrough to a downspout and then to the pipes. That was it. Bob's your uncle.

Over time, these ceramic pipes fill wtih soil, whcih means they either have to be dug up and emptied and relaid, or dug up, removed and replaced. Why use something again that worked for 80 years? Since modern materials have made life easier, we have also made it more complex. Now when you want to do a drain properly, here's the recipe.

First you dig a trench at least 2 feet deep around all four side of your house. (That's a lot of digging.)

Then you pressure wash the house foundation and fix any cement aberrations that need repairing before smearing the whole thing with a thick. goopy, smelly black substance that smells like creosote (perhaps it is creosote, I don't know, I only watch this thing unfold). This black stuff must dry and in the winter this can take a few days.

Then you line your trench with a few inches of gravel before lying lengths of perforated plastic pipe. This is pipe with holes along it so that all ground water can enter the pipe and move along it, through it and down it, or up and over it.

Top with more gravel, and then a layer of landscape cloth, then more gravel. See waht I mean? Doesn't this remind you of those ghastly layered salads you used to find a church socials and high school fundraising dinners?

Now you are ready for the dimple wall, a thick plastic sheet with, yes, dimples, that is fixed into place. Another pipe is laid on top of this, but this one is holeless. These pipes, by the way, connect to the downspouts so that all water entering them is moved along and then away from your house entirely - shown off your property like some angry father with a lovestruck youth singing badly under his daughter's window, except the kid gets the window wrong and instead gets caught singing love songs to the girl's grandmother who took two hours to get to sleep in the first place and is now hopping mad at being woken up which infuriates her son, the father of the intended recipient of the warbled arias.

But I digress.

More gravel is placed over this second pipe, making the top now level with the surface and good to go on its own or ready for paving stones, cement pads, or whatever.

We decided that wasn't quite enough of a production (now that we know we don't in fact need a new sump and feeling the need for something to fill the void) so agreed to include a 1 foot wide line of gravel along the north side of the house, separating the house from the garden, with a line of pressure treated wood separating the gravel from the soil.