(Warning: If you are a member of my family, this is Required Reading. Get a cup of coffee and settle in or I’ll cut you out of the will. Be grateful for the pictures. If you aren’t family, get an excuse from your doctor. You get points if you wade through it.)
Part I
Among the many, many, many things the <numerous expletives deleted> developer did criminally incorrectly when my poor sad house was put in place was, I am far beyond positive, putting perforated drainage pipe around the house, dropping it a foot or two down the hill, and leaving it there so all the roof and garage run-off could eat the hill from the inside out. Which it has done.
The first thing Wonderful Slope Guy did when he came by and gave me a free consultation (blessed be he forever) on the recommendation of my landscaping-with-native-plants teacher was write me a list of things to do to stabilize the clifflet and prevent as much additional erosion as possible. Number one on that list, in Large Bold Letters, was know where your run-off goes and control it.
Well, I knew where my run-off went. Down the gutters, swooshing through the downspouts, and into the (cheap-@$$, 18-year-old, most-likely-broken-and-crumbled since its useful life is 10 years) buried corrugated piping ubiquitous around here, and thence into the ground, probably under my house and down said clifflet, happily destabilizing everything that needs to be stable.
So I Made A Plan. (I don’t make plans. I am no good at plans. I hate plans. Plans always go awry. It’s a rule.) I hauled out the longest measuring tape I have (30′) and started measuring how much corrugated pipe I’d need to replace the old, broken stuff with new but malignant, possessed-by-devils stuff. This was entertaining, given that I had no helper and the tape wouldn’t stay where I hooked it. Many unplanned (see?) whacks on the knuckle by unexpectedly and rapidly retracting tape occurred. Much swearing and stomping of feet nevertheless, repeated often enough, tamed the tape, and eventually I determined how much hose and what kinds of fittings I needed (connectors, adapters. Ts, Ys). I was going to run the two garage downspouts into one hose, the two south-end-of-house ones into another, and the same on the north side, with the drainage hoses going all the way down the hill this time, to drain safely away from my poor beleaguered cliff.
My friend and neighbor Linda got roped into this by virtue of a) the Curse of Competence, b) previous evidence of ingenious problem solving, and c) an apparently suicidal desire to be helpful. I showed her my plans, and she immediately consolidated the garage hose with the south-end hose, lopping about 100′ of piping (and $60) off my bill. She even went shopping with me, and that turned into An Adventure.
Lowe’s didn’t have anything I needed but caps for the hoses I was going to cut off and seal. We went to Hardware Sales. They had everything (of course!!! They’re Hardware Sales!), bless them, and cheaper than Lowe’s, so I wound up with two 100′ rolls of hose, a couple of Ys, a T, blah blah, that added up to about $270, which was more than I was willing to invest in this d@mn place, but what can you do? All it has to do is last another 10 years or so, ’til I croak. After that, I don’t care.
Hardware Sales (which still sells screws and nails by the each or pound, for those of you unfamiliar with its wondrousness) keeps all its drainage-hose stuff outside, stuffed under a steep roof and behind a long bank of shelf units perpendicular to the deep, dark cubbyholes in which reside all the fittings. Linda, who … let’s just say dislikes mice and such … commented to that effect, then courageously reached into one of the deep, dark cubbies, at which point the nice man who was helping us leaped at her and growled, causing her to jump, shriek, have a small, quick heart attack, and smack the guy on the noggin.
This is how things go with Linda.
She had driven on this outing, since she has a rather large car (compared to my wee Ladybug) and we figured the hose etc. could go in her trunk no problem. Oops… problem. Even one 100′ roll of corrugated hose wouldn’t fit in her trunk or in the back seat, and we had two rolls plus a big box of fittings. So the nice man tied one roll onto her roof. We trucked it home and unloaded it, whereupon I walked it down the stairs.
We discovered that Linda had lost her wallet. Naturally, great angst ensued and phone calls were made to Lowe’s, where we quickly headed and which we quickly scoured, to no avail, for her missing property. Next had to be Hardware Sales, ’cause we didn’t go anywhere else, did we?
She wandered off one way, I another (I took the deep, dark cubbyholes). We met in front of the cubbies.
“No luck,” she said. “God, I hate this.”
“None for me, either,” I said. “You wanna go look back there?”
“No.”
“Well, wait a second,” I said, and went back in there again, this time looking all along the floor and under the cubbies’ lips (cavities, ha ha ha) instead of in the cubbies… and there was her wallet. On the ground, tucked a bit out of sight. Calloo, callay! O frabjous day! So we found Nice Scary Man, who loaded up the second roll of hose like a little car-sized top hat, and we drove it home.
We had quite a time attaching and screwing together All The Things. I’m not going to go into the Keystone Kops routines we did with our various and intermingled tools, or the three trips Linda sent me on to her house to retrieve tools I didn’t have but that we needed rather desperately. Suffice it to say that eventually, all the tools were in the same big black trash can and were being used with great regularity.
Between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., we had first connected the two garage downspouts (rather tidily, if I do say so, with sheet-metal screws which I later wrapped with specially made tape).

Step one: Attaching the garage downspouts. Eureka!

The rest of the garage connection. Double Eureka!
Then we tackled the downspout closest to the door on the south side. This required removing three of the deck boards so we could see and (we hoped) easily get beneath the downspout, where we intended to connect the new hose after dragging it by main force under the deck. Then we intended to run it down the side of the house. However, this is what we found.

Lots of short, angle-y 2x6s and many-lots of spider webs, along with a quite large spider that Linda was positive was out to get her. That’s Linda in the corner, glaring at the uncooperative substructure. The spider wound up a blotch on the ground.
Just getting to that was A Major Ordeal involving the unintended stripping of four screws (ones with those square holes in them–honestly, whoever invented the square holes, the star-shaped ones, and anything but flat and Phillips ought to be keel-hauled, tarred and feathered, and tossed out of town with the glass recycling). After we got them out (by virtue of channel locks and elbow grease), I crawled partly under the deck (I’m too old and creaky to get all the way under. Three more days and I’m Officially Old). It didn’t look any more promising from that perspective, and it looked a whole lot more spidery. We looked at each other and said, “Well-l-l-l-l-l, I think we’ll just bypass that. We can always raise the gutter so the water goes to the other end.”
On to greater things. After the T joint and woman-handling the hose under the deck, hooking up an in-line connector was a breeze, and then, like magic, we were at the far end, where we hooked up a Y. I threw the remainder of the hose down the cliff, then scrambled, slipped, slid, and not-fell (mirabile dictu!) down the cliff, where I had to stake the end of the hose to make it stay in place. But yay! That end was done!

Y connector on the south side of the house. Nice job, us!

And yippeeee! Down the hill it went.
And evening and morning were the first day.
Part II
There was still plenty to do, and the next day I got to do it by myself. Namely, digging a trench in the gravel walkway in which to bury the hose, running it under the 6×6 edging, connecting it to the Y assembly, taping all the joints, and letting it bop down the hill.
This did not go, shall we say, smoothly. Oh, digging the trench wasn’t too bad, once I got past the fact that you can’t dig out sharp gravel with a shovel and discovered that the hand mattock was da bunnies. But digging it deep enough, under the 6×6… yeah, that was a whole ‘nother story. ‘Cause right there, about 2.75″ under the 6×6? Where I needed a tish over 3″ of clearance to get the hose in? Yeah, right there was a boulder about the size of Vermont. Plan awry! I could not budge it, no matter how much I muttered, swore, and banged on it with implements that should have been harder than the boulder. So I stalked into the house, muttering and snarling, grabbed my pry bar, stomped back outside, put the pry bar under the 6×6, and stood on the pry bar, using the bloody boulder itself to lever up the 6×6 enough to quick, shove the hose under. Connecting it, screwing it together, and taping All The Joints was a snap after that. (Comparatively. This does not equate to “easy.”)
Then there was the matter of keeping the hose from crumbling when people (hah! who am I kidding? I. When I, ’cause I’m the only person who’s ever here) walk over it. I had a fortuitously sized length of rigid plastic pipe. I measured and hand-sawed off the appropriate length to cover the hose. I got out my little saber saw, which has served me so very well so many times in the past, and cut the pipe piece in half longitudinally… and discovered that a power saw generates enough heat to let the plastic pipe seal itself behind the saw. So I had to hand-saw both sides of that little mother, too. More awry. Everywhere you look, awry.
This did not make me a very happy camper. In fact, it escalated the grumpiness from the digging/boulder fiasco. I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but it’s true. I was ticked off.
The half-pipe, though, went down perfectly over the corrugated hose. I shoveled the gravel over it, stomped on all of it as hard as I could, and called it good. I hope to heck it doesn’t let that particular subset of All the Dirt Around My Sad House go floating down the coulee.

The Y-joint, corrugated hose, and sawn half-pipe in the trench. Go, me!

The Y-joint/hose, all covered up and stomped into place.

The pipe emerging from beneath the 6×6 and heading off downhill to find mischief to get into. Yes, I need to adjust the slope so it will all drain downhill. One step at a time, OK?
The grand 66.6% finale! And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Part III
The third day, last chance to finish before a big rainstorm moved in, Linda and I were confident. We’d done the hard parts. We figured we could knock this last, north-end bit out of the park in an hour or two.
At first, things went smoothly. If you discount the fact that she broke my tiny drill bit, then lost the fragment we could still use, and then found a nail-screw hybrid on the ground and stuck that into her drill chuck!

First connection on the northwest corner: easy-peasy.
But the Project Gods had other ideas.
Rather than the Y connector I’d gotten for the northeast corner of the house, Linda determined an elbow (which I had) and a T (which I didn’t) would work better. I’m still not convinced of that, and I may yet, some day when I’m feeling both lucky and risky, go back and re-do it.
But that necessitated a trip to Hardware Sales–an essential part of any project, though we had fewer Trips Back to the Store than most people–to buy the T. I had clippered my hair to the crew cut the night before, and on the way out of the store, out of the blue, Linda pops up: “Do you suppose people think we’re a lesbian couple? You have a crew cut and we’re not wearing rings!”
I really did nearly rupture my diaphragm laughing. “If they do,” I gasped, “I hope it contributes to a rich fantasy life!”
So. We had the northwest drainspout hooked up and going east around the corner. We hooked up the hose, the elbow, and the T, and hooked them up to the downspout. Among other adventures, we managed to avoid Linda tumbling over backwards down the hill when she tried to sit on the stepstool while it tilted backwards. “You don’t wanna do th–” I started, then grabbed her arm as she shrieked and started to flip over. Save!

Down the north side of the house, west to east. One. More. Set. Of. Joints.
Then came the last hookup: the hose to the T, and then down that side of the hill.
The problem was that the 75′ of remaining hose was rolled up. Despite being labeled “flexible,” this corrugated stuff is so not flexible. It is, as I may have mentioned, infested with evil wights that cause it to flop around in unimaginable directions and configurations. Linda Blair had it easy.
There we were, mooshed up against the back side of the house with about a two-foot area between wall, us, and dropping to the center of the earth. And 75′ of unpredictable and surprisingly heavy drain pipe. Linda insisted moving it this way would let it unroll easily; I pointed out that doing so would turn it into a knot. We argued and futzed with it ’til I finally went around the house, onto the deck, and tried to pull it out straight across the deck and the south end of the gravel walk.
Epic fail. I wound up dancing with the darn stuff, as every time I straightened out a coil, two others locked into place between me and Linda. She was, I think, getting pinched rather nastily by the stuff, but she didn’t wail.
Eventually, I got it straightened out and lopped off about 25′, thinking that would leave more than enough to go down the hill and bypass it entirely before water came out.
But.
That long a chunk of hose (about 45-50′) weighs a really whole big lot. I’m not strong enough to throw it from the deck down the hill and have it fall neatly into the place I wanted it to be. I tried two or three times before admitting defeat, though I refused to cry.
“Here, tie a rock to it,” Linda said.
“How’s that gonna make it less heavy to throw?”
“Oh.”
“I’m gonna have to go down there. I don’t see any other way to get it where it should be.”
Down I went. Now, when I went down there last summer, it was dry and easy to walk on. After several rains, there’s actual standing water, and you cannot tell how deep it (and the mud beneath) is because the autumn leaves have stained the water a dark coffee color. So I was climbing, creeping across, balancing on, and clinging to all manner of boulders, fallen and mossy nurse logs, and I think even swinging from tree to tree, at about the top speed of a three-toed sloth. So like three or four centimeters per minute, tops.
I could get within about 8″ of reaching the pipe. I stretched. I held on to a semi-stable cut tree limb and stretched farther. I picked up a hook-shaped limb and tried to snag it. All to no, as they say, avail.
Moving at slow-sloth speed, I inched forward on a mossy boulder, hooked my arm around its edge, and le-e-a-a-aned forward. At the ultimate stretch… I got it! I grabbed that pipe, yanked on it, and didn’t let go.
Unfortunately, the wights were still in there and having a party. I was able to get the curly pipe into place, but it wouldn’t lay flat. It insisted on springing straight up in the air, no matter how I shook it or waggled it. It was way too excited about this whole thing.
“Hey,” I hollered the 30′ or so up to where Linda was laughing. “Can you th’ow me that brick?”
“Sure,” she said. “Stand behind that tree.”
The only tree within an hour’s sloth race stood about 6″ in diameter. “That tree’s too little,” I pointed out. “You’ll hit me.”
“Sissy,” she said, and tossed it.
The brick landed about six feet away from me, miraculously not in either one of the dark unplumbable bottomless voids or in the equally deep (I was certain) mud. I picked it up, slithered over to the end of the hose, wrestled it onto the ground, and plopped the brick on top of it.
Hah. Opposable thumbs win again!

This is going off the gravely part and down into the jungle, where…

… this does not give you a sense of scale. It’s about 40′ straight down, maybe more, and that cedar tree it snakes around is about 18″ in diameter. It is most definitely not a sapling. That tree covering up part of the hose at the bottom of the shot is a big-leaf maple, one of two that will have to come out soon so they don’t grow overnight to 250′.
After Linda gave out and went home, another hour or so taping all the joints (which was much more difficult than anticipated because of the tight T-joint clearance, which is why I think I may need to go back and put in the Y), I gathered up tools, hauled tools and spare parts inside ’cause it was gonna rain, and got ready for the neighborhood Halloween potluck. (I went as a psychopath: They look just like everybody else, so the costume is easy-peasy.)
And the evening and the morning made the third day.
Epilogue
Today, it’s rained. Despite having nightmares that it’s all going to melt or be dragged away by ravens or eaten by bears, the hoses still seem to be in place.
I hope to all that’s holy that they stay that way, and that the dirt underneath (especially that very narrow spot at the northeast corner) doesn’t decide to get miffed about the whole thing and head for Idaho.
The bad thing about having done this: The Curse of Competence will apply. That means the next time I need Son Assistance, I’ll get told, “Ma, you did all that drain stuff by yourself (not true! I had Linda the Clever!). You don’t need my/our/his help!”
No matter what, an old lady can’t win. And don’t forget: As of Sunday, I am officially an Old Lady.
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