 Over the past year or so I put drain pipes from my gutters that drain to different spots in my backyard so that the gutter downspouts just don't empty out right on the pavement and grass. Now is not a good time to show you because it's the middle of February and there's a foot of snow outside, but let me show you how I put them in, how deep I dug them in, what type of sand and stone I used and how well they work. Okay this is something I've been working on for the past couple years of my house trying to simplify the drainage pattern. Originally all the gutters just drained right onto the grass or the sidewalk and here's what it was by the side of my garage. You can see the downspot just came to this little trough and it just drained off into the grass. It was annoying, it was a pain of getting away so I thought I could put a drain pipe that went under the ground. So I dug, I had to dig under this little pathway, it wasn't too hard, the ground wasn't too bad and the key before you start any of these things is guessing how many roots you might have in an area. This was fine. I hit soft ground, it wasn't bad, I just got rid of the sod and I had clay which is another reason why my yard doesn't drain very well. Here in Michigan we have a clay which water will sit on rather than drain into. If you have sandy soils you might not be too concerned about this but I dug down probably about a foot and I widened it in this area. The first section of pipe was a 10 foot solid PVC. The second section had holes in it to let the water drain out so I widened that area. And here's where I came off the gutter downspot and I had the PVC and it went under the sidewalk and you can see it was just like that. These are two 10 foot sections and this is the section with holes in it. Also at the end I put this upwards bout so it can drain off into the yard so it doesn't flow back. This was Pete Moss I used to regard him but this was the sand that I also had delivered and I took that sand and I put that in the hole where the drains were to give it a room to drain. I covered it back up with clay, put the sod back on and it was fine. That was the first area I did and it worked great. I didn't have any problems. Here was the next one I did and I'm draining off my rain barrels. I had an overflow so I bought this corrugated black pipe that came all coiled up in a nice little package from Home Depot for probably 20 bucks. And that worked pretty well. I probably should have done instead of the PVC from the beginning I should have probably used stuff like this or they have bigger rolls of it. The cool thing is you can bend it, you can twist it, you can do whatever you want with it. And what I was using it for, this is fine. This has the holes already in it and you can put the upwards felt wherever you want in the garden. But this was the real hard one. I wanted to come down and go into the slab and under another sidewalk and this took days of chipping away with a sledgehammer on a pick to go through that. I moved this slab out of the way and I ran the pipe underneath it. It was a big pain and a big mess and in hindsight I probably shouldn't have done it. But I came underneath the sidewalk and the slab and I dug out and this was all roots through here and it was a big pain. You had to cut all these out. I finally got through it all and here's the solid pipe and here's the pipe you can see with the holes in it. And I originally thought here's the other problem. The first one I did I had enough slope. This one was pretty flat. So I didn't have enough slope to go down and then back up. So this ended up not being as working as well and it didn't drain. This used to get all wet through here. But this was the first year I did it. I just filled it back with the clay and put the slab back and it looked pretty good. Here was the second year where I had to, this is where the drain originally went the first year and I had to extend it another 10 feet to this point. So I had to put another bend and go in here. So things you got to worry about are roots that you're going to have to cut through. Those are a big pain. Going under sidewalks are concrete. If you're going to try to go under it, don't move it because you're never going to get it back level in the right spot. If you can dig under with an ice auger is what I use a spoon ice auger. Try to leave it in place if not. You're going to have to report the concrete and make sure you have enough slope from the gutter here to the drain here. This was pretty flat in my backyard so this didn't work. I had to extend it even further and that was a big one bit of a pain. I eventually broke up all of that concrete that I thought I could save and I put this concrete. I had to report the concrete. I would suggest instead of using this white PVC used that black corrugated pipe, it's much easier. So good luck and it's a pain digging so take several days over the summer.