Please ignore the mess of toys and patio furniture since l was just trying to get everything off the patio to drain and clean it. This is our first spring/summer in our ranch home built in the 50's. We have a walkout basement that goes to a paver patio. In the low corner of the patio there is a drain vent that we just realized drained into the dirt 10-15 feet away. We have had significant rain in the past month, and our patio keeps flooding, and this past weekend the water got into our basement under our French door. So I did some digging today while draining our patio from the 4-6 inches of sitting water. And found the end of the drain pipe just ending in the mud pit. Our property line is lined on one side with what I can only assume is a retaining wall that is buried, then there is a small cutout about 4-6" deep and then the wall goes perpendicular to it at 90 degrees and runs beyond our patio and up to our upper part of our yard where it meets another retaining wall and stairs. First thing we need to fix is the flooding, which I was going to just redo the patio drain with a new French drain, but I have no where to run it to, to get to the street would require us to go uphill in either direction. The area under the trampoline has mulch with landscape fabric under it. There is an edging border that is separating the grass. We are getting ready to replace the chain link fence with a wood privacy fence and move the trampoline to the other side of our house.
My first question is this wall running the property line along with the fence, is it really doing anything besides holding up water drainage? Our neighbors yard on the other side of the fence is even with our yard but does slope about 6 feet from the fence. I'm wondering if removing this wall would help with allowing water to drain better. Also I'm worried about burying new wood fence posts next to the wall. If it is something that does in fact need to stay, should we dig it down a few inches and just make it a rock patio/fire pit area? I just get the feeling that we are holding back so much moisture in this corner of our yard with the low corner being completely concreted in except for a few inch hole.k