Landscaping services
Grading decides where water goes; drainage handles what the grade cannot. Together they are the only landscaping work whose success is defined by nothing visible happening, and the thing they protect is not the lawn — it is the foundation, the patio base, the retaining wall and the tree roots. Every other outdoor job is built on top of this one, which is why it is the one to fix first and the one most often skipped.
HyreYard is not a landscaping company. We plant nothing, grade nothing, build no wall, cut no tree and pull no permit. This page explains the work so you can read a proposal and judge the company that wrote it.
If this is happening now. Water standing against a foundation wall, running into a crawl space or basement, or appearing indoors after rain is a building problem before it is a landscaping one. Get the immediate source stopped — a disconnected or overflowing downspout, a blocked area drain, a gutter that has failed — and get the ground next to the wall looked at. Repeated saturation against a foundation is not a cosmetic issue and it does not resolve by itself. You can also reach HyreYard on (866) 582-8523.
Water problems leave evidence, and the evidence is specific enough to narrow the cause before anyone digs. Walk the property during rain, not after it.
Six distinct problems get one name and one quote. They have different causes, different fixes and wildly different prices, and telling them apart is the whole of the diagnosis.
| Roof water | Gutters and downspouts discharging at the wall or a few feet from it. The most common cause, the cheapest to fix, and the one most often skipped in favour of something more expensive downhill. |
|---|---|
| Surface flow from upslope | Water arriving across the ground from a neighbouring lot, a driveway or a higher slope. Handled by intercepting and redirecting it — a swale, a berm, a graded route — not by draining the place it ends up. |
| Negative grade at the building | The ground falls toward the house rather than away from it, often because backfill settled after construction. A foundation problem in the making, and re-establishing the fall is the fix. |
| Soil that will not absorb | Heavy clay, a compacted layer from construction traffic, or a high water table. The water has nowhere to go down, so infiltration solutions do not work and the answer has to move it sideways. |
| Subsurface flow | Water moving through the ground and emerging where a layer changes or the slope breaks. This is the case a properly designed interceptor drain is actually for. |
| Failed or blocked existing drainage | A pipe, area drain or dry well already there and silted, crushed, root-invaded or never connected to an outlet. Always worth establishing before installing a second system next to the first. |
A drainage proposal produced without any of the following has priced a product, not a solution. Each of these is a question with an answer, and the answers together decide the design.
The order matters more here than in any other landscape trade. Each step can remove the need for the one after it, and a job that starts at step five has skipped the cheap fixes.
Someone walks the property while it is actually raining, or works from photographs and video taken then. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the only one that produces direct evidence rather than inference. Photograph your own yard mid-storm before anyone visits.
The soil’s hydrologic group decides whether water can be put into the ground at all, and the outlet decides where it goes if it cannot. Neither is a preference. A design with no identified outlet is not finished.
Levels taken around the building and across the problem area, so the fall is a number rather than an impression. Ground that looks flat routinely falls the wrong way by an amount that matters.
Extending, rerouting or burying downspout discharge so roof water leaves well away from the building. It is the cheapest intervention available and it resolves a large share of complaints on its own. It should be tried and observed before anything is trenched.
Building the ground back up against the foundation so it falls away, and keeping soil below any siding, cladding or weep-hole line. This is grading work, not drainage work, and it is usually the highest-value thing done on the whole job.
Swales, berms and graded routes that lead surface water around and away by shaping the ground. They cost less than pipe, they cannot block, and they do not need cleaning. Where the topography allows one, a swale beats a drain.
Where surface work cannot do it, a designed subsurface system: an excavated trench, clean open-graded stone, perforated pipe laid to a consistent fall, a filter separation so soil fines cannot blind the stone, and a defined outlet. Every one of those five is a specification line.
The outlet built and protected, the trenches backfilled and compacted so they do not become the new low point, turf or bed restored, and the system watched during the next real storm. A drainage job is not finished until it has been rained on.
The USDA classification your mapped soil falls into. It is the fastest way to know whether putting water into the ground is a plausible strategy on your lot, and you can look it up yourself for nothing on the Web Soil Survey.
| Group A — Low runoff runoff potential | Deep sands and gravelly sands. Water goes down. |
|---|---|
| Group B — Moderately low runoff potential | Moderately well to well drained, moderate texture. |
| Group C — Moderately high runoff potential | A layer that impedes downward movement, or finer texture. |
| Group D — High runoff runoff potential | Clays with high shrink-swell, a high water table, a claypan, or shallow soil over near-impervious material. |
| Why it decides the design | Infiltration solutions — dry wells, rain gardens, soakaways, infiltration trenches — depend on the ground accepting water. In group A and B soils that is usually reasonable. In group D it frequently is not, and a dry well built there is a hole that fills and stays full. |
| The caveat that matters | The Web Soil Survey is a survey map, not a site investigation of your lot. Use it to frame the conversation and to catch an obviously wrong assumption; it does not replace someone looking at the actual ground. |
Drainage is the purest case of the buried-work problem: when it is finished there is nothing to inspect, and the only evidence you will ever have that it was built properly is the piece of paper describing it. A proposal that names a product and a price but none of the following has not been designed.
None of this is visible when the job is finished, which is exactly why it has to be on paper before it starts. The same argument applied to hardscape is on the base specification, and what we could verify about soil behaviour and yard flooding is collected on soil drainage and yard flooding.
Drainage is priced on how much ground is moved, how far the water has to be carried, and how much of what it crosses has to be restored afterwards. The cheapest version of this job is almost always the one that works on the surface.
| Factor | Why it changes the number |
|---|---|
| Whether the fix is surface or subsurface | Regrading and shaping a swale moves earth. Trenching, stone, pipe, separation and restoration is a different order of work. A diagnosis that allows the surface answer is worth real money. |
| Length of run to the outlet | Every foot between the problem and somewhere lower that water is allowed to go is trench, stone, pipe and backfill. A yard with no low point is a much harder job than a sloping one. |
| Depth | Trench depth drives excavation, spoil volume and, past a point, the equipment and the shoring conversation. Depth is set by the fall the design needs, not by preference. |
| Soil and what is in it | Rock, roots, heavy clay and old construction debris all slow a trencher down. The hydrologic group also decides whether infiltration is available at all. |
| What the run crosses | A trench under an existing driveway, patio, walkway or wall is a demolition and reinstatement job in the middle of a drainage job, and it is often the largest single line. |
| Restoration | Turf, beds and planting disturbed by the work have to be put back. On a finished landscape this can rival the drainage itself. |
| Spoil disposal | Excavated material leaves by truck and is tipped for a fee. Trench spoil is heavy and there is usually more of it than anyone expects. |
| Access | Whether a machine reaches the work. Hand-digging a long run through a narrow gate changes the labour line completely. |
| Design and survey work | Levels taken, a real diagnosis, and on a complicated lot a civil or geotechnical opinion. A line item worth having rather than one worth removing. |
| Permits and discharge rules | Some jurisdictions regulate grading, discharge to the street or the storm system, and any work near a watercourse or wetland. These are local questions with local answers. |
HyreYard publishes no average price for this work and holds no dataset of landscaping invoices. Access, soil, grade, regional labour and material availability move the number far enough that a single figure would mislead more than it helped.
If the first thing you are offered is a French drain, ask what the diagnosis was. A French drain is a real solution to a real and reasonably narrow problem: water that has to be intercepted and carried away below the surface, on ground with somewhere lower to carry it to. It is not a general-purpose answer to a wet yard, and it is the single most over-prescribed item in the trade because it is a definable product with a per-foot price. Before you buy one, ask where the water is coming from, what the soil group is, where the outlet is and why the surface answer was rejected. A contractor who can answer those four without hesitating is the one to hire, whatever they then recommend.
The full ten-point checklist is on choosing a landscaping company, and the lines a comparable bid contains are on reading a landscaping estimate.
The most common and the most expensive error in the trade. A French drain installed to fix a roof-water problem carries roof water that should never have been in the ground, and the wet patch often comes back.
Pipe laid to nowhere, or to a point no lower than the pipe itself, is a buried reservoir. The outlet is the first thing to establish and the last thing to be checked.
Infiltration needs ground that accepts water. In high-runoff soils — clays, a high water table, shallow soil over near-impervious material — the excavation fills, stays full, and becomes the wettest thing on the lot.
Ordinary fill gravel contains fines that lock the voids. A drainage trench needs clean open-graded aggregate, and the difference is invisible once it is backfilled.
Without a separation between the stone and the surrounding soil, fines wash into the voids over a few seasons. The system fails gradually and looks identical from the surface for its whole decline.
A trench filled loosely settles, and the settled line becomes the lowest ground in the lawn. The drain then collects the water it created.
Concentrating and discharging water onto an adjoining property is a legal question in most jurisdictions and a durable source of dispute in all of them. Ask where the water goes after it leaves your lot.
Re-establishing fall at the building is right; burying the bottom of the cladding or covering weep holes to achieve it is not. The fall has to be made without raising soil to where it should not be.
EPA: “much of the land surface is covered by buildings, pavement and compacted landscapes. These surfaces do not allow rain and snow melt to soak into the ground which greatly increases the volume and velocity of stormwater runoff” A patio, a driveway extension or a compacted landscape adds to the volume and velocity of runoff rather than absorbing it. The EPA page states the mechanism and does not publish a runoff percentage. We do not publish one either.
Every planting bed, patio, wall and irrigation line installed before the drainage is resolved is something that has to be dug through afterwards. This job is cheapest when it is first.
Possibly, and far less often than they are sold. A subsurface drain is the right answer when water has to be intercepted below the surface and there is somewhere lower to take it — subsurface flow emerging at a slope break, or a chronically wet area on ground with a usable outlet. It is the wrong answer when the actual source is a downspout discharging at the wall, when the ground falls toward the building and needs regrading, or when the soil is a high-runoff group with no outlet available, in which case the trench simply fills. The honest sequence is diagnosis, then the cheapest solution that addresses the diagnosis, and only then a pipe.
Something upstream of the water changed. The usual candidates are a new impervious surface on your lot or a neighbouring one, an extension or a new driveway, a regrade next door, a mature tree removed, or existing drainage that has silted, been crushed or become root-invaded without anybody noticing. Compaction from construction traffic is another: ground driven over by heavy equipment stops absorbing water and does not recover on its own. EPA describes the mechanism directly, noting that buildings, pavement and compacted landscapes do not allow rain and snow melt to soak into the ground, which greatly increases the volume and velocity of runoff. Finding what changed is usually faster than designing around the symptom.
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service publishes the Web Soil Survey, a free parcel-level lookup of the mapped soil, its drainage class, its hydrologic soil group and its shrink-swell potential. It is free, it takes about five minutes, and it is the cheapest useful thing a homeowner can do before buying drainage or hardscape. The hydrologic group is the line to read for drainage: group A is deep sand where water moves downward readily, and group D is high runoff — clays with high shrink-swell, a high water table, a claypan, or shallow soil over near-impervious material. One caveat worth keeping: it is a survey map, not a site investigation of your particular lot, so use it to frame the conversation rather than to settle it.
Grading, almost always, and it is also usually cheaper. Water that can be led away by shaping the ground never enters a pipe, so it cannot block a pipe, silt a pipe or need a pipe cleaned. A properly graded swale is a permanent, maintenance-free piece of infrastructure that looks like lawn. Subsurface drainage exists for the water that grading cannot reach — water already in the ground, or water on a site with no room to shape a route. A proposal that reaches for pipe without having established why the surface answer will not work has skipped a step that would have saved you money.
Enough that surface water leaves rather than sits, established for a measured distance out from the wall rather than for the first few inches. The specific figure is set by the building code your jurisdiction has adopted and by local practice, and it is a question for your building department rather than one we will invent a number for. What matters practically is that it is measured rather than eyeballed — ground that looks level frequently falls the wrong way — and that the fall is achieved by building the ground up correctly rather than by heaping soil against the cladding or over weep holes.
Rarely, and it often makes things worse. Filling a low area moves the low point somewhere else without changing where the water comes from or where it can go, and if the underlying soil does not absorb, the new topsoil simply becomes saturated topsoil. If the wet spot is caused by a settled utility trench, filling it is reasonable as part of a fix — but the trench should be compacted back in lifts rather than topped up, because loose fill will settle again on the same schedule that created the problem. If the wet spot is where water naturally collects on a site with no outlet, the useful question is whether to fight it or to plant it, and a rain garden in the right soil is a legitimate answer.
A subsurface run will be dug through whatever is on top of it, so yes, and the restoration is a real cost that belongs in the quote rather than in a conversation afterwards. This is one of the strongest practical arguments for doing drainage before the rest of the landscape rather than after it: on bare ground a trench is a trench, and on a mature planted garden it is a trench plus the reinstatement of everything it crossed. If the work has to cross an existing patio, walkway or wall, establish before signing who is removing and rebuilding that, to what specification, and whether it is in the price.
Sometimes, and it varies more than most homeowners expect. Some jurisdictions require a permit for grading above a certain volume or on slopes, some regulate connection or discharge to the street or the storm system, and work near a watercourse, wetland or floodplain frequently brings a separate authority into the picture. Separately from any permit, discharging concentrated water onto a neighbouring property is a civil matter in most places. The model administrative permit exemptions carry a sentence worth remembering here too: exemptions from permit requirements do not authorise work in violation of any other laws or ordinances of the jurisdiction. Ask the local authority — the call is free and the answer is specific to where you live.
Information on this page is general and varies by climate, soil, grade, construction and local code. It is not horticultural, arboricultural or engineering advice, and a local building department, water utility or homeowners association can impose requirements that take precedence over anything written here. HyreYard is an independent landscaping resource and connection platform, not a landscaping company, and does not perform, supervise, inspect or warrant any outdoor work.
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