Ever since we moved into our current house we have had a drainage problem in the front yard.  The first time we had a big rain our crawl space got flooded.  That's not good. Especially when the hot water heater is in the crawl space.  (Don't ask, that's another subject entirely).  Eric and his dad did some work a couple of years ago that kept the water from flooding the crawl space, but it didn't correct the source of the problem.  Well today we did.  Or I should say our neighbor did. 

We have a neighbor with a backhoe who does odd jobs on the weekend.  We hired him to dig a ditch in between our house and the one next door.  We have a drainage pipe that runs underneath the street, but the ditch wasn't deep enough for the water to drain properly.  So he came over and redid the ditch and used the extra dirt to level our yard so that the water would flow to the ditch.  He also took out some really ugly bushes that were on the side of our yard. 

Here are the befores:

 

The bushes I was referring to:

During:

Finished!

Dirt in the front yard.  We're going to get some grass seed and hopefully that will make it look better.

Remember the posts that were left after taking down the chain-link fence?  We got him to pull those out while he was here!

The backyard looks much better without them!