I am a novice DIYer, doing up the back garden. At the moment the whole garden is paved with concrete (?) slabs/flags, but they are just laid down on the ground and not cemented in except in a few places. There is also a wide (about 1m wide and 2 brick courses deep) gully thing outside the lounge doors which means you have to step down and then step up onto the tiled bit. (see pics below)
My plan is to effectively make this wide gully a lot narrower by putting in a linear drain running along the side of the house. I'll then fill in the gap and re-lay the slabs so that they go up to the grate of the linear drain. Then the back half of the garden I'm planning to do a lawn. (I hope this all makes sense!)
First problem I'm having is that the only drain I can see looks like a foul water drain - when I turn on tap water comes out of the top pipe you can see in the below picture, and when I flush the loo the water comes out of the channel near the bottom. I can't seem to find an existing sortof rain runoff pipe to connect to. The house is a terraced house built around 1965ish. Do you think there is another drain somewhere under the rest of the paving? We have installed an outdoor tap but it doesnt have a grate thing underneath at the moment and I want to put one in too.
If there is no rainwater/runoff drain for me to connect to I am a bit stuck, as the soil is quite clay-ey (neighbours garden is a little soggy but is lower than ours). Also, the garden is quite small (the grass bit will be about 5.5m by 3m in the end) so I dont think I can do a SUDS/soakaway thing either. Any advice?
Second point is just to confirm, as I am new to all this, that because its just going to get foot traffic, I dont need a sub-base and I can just do a 50mm bedding layer of 10:1 sharp sand/cement. For compacting the bedding layer, do you think I should try hire some kind of plate compacter?
All advice welcome!
Pic of the gully thing running alongside the house
Pics of the drain - the only one I can see anyway -Inside:
Pic of the outside of the house from the back garden - you can see where the soil pipe comes down the wall and a gray pipe from the basin which just goes down under some concrete slabs I can't get up in the gully. You can see the outside tap just under the black soil stack but it doesnt drain into anything yet...
Sorry this post is so long!!
Thanks
Mary
