Drainage is where we start on every project, and it is also a standalone service for the significant number of Lake Houston corridor homeowners who already have turf — or who are planning to install it — and have identified a drainage problem that needs to be addressed as its own scope of work.
After Harvey, a meaningful share of calls we received were not about turf installation at all. They were about drainage. Homeowners in Atascocita Forest, Forest Cove, and the Bear Branch corridor who had turf or grass yards that held water for days after the storm wanted to understand what a dedicated drainage system could do to change that outcome for the next event. The answer is: it depends on where the water is coming from and where it has somewhere to go.
I spent my pool construction years thinking about water management as a systems problem — how pool deck drainage, equipment room drainage, and yard drainage connect into a coherent flow path. That systems thinking is what we bring to standalone drainage installations in the Lake Houston watershed. A French drain installed in isolation without a mapped outlet is not a drainage solution; it is a drain that fills up and backs up. A perimeter trench without adequate flow capacity is not better than no trench. And a perforated drain stub that empties into a yard that is itself poorly graded does not solve the problem — it just moves it a few feet.
We design drainage systems for turf zones that function from the pool coping outward to the property's actual drainage outlet, with each component sized for the storm event the property is expected to experience. In the Lake Houston watershed, that means sizing for significantly more than a standard residential design event — because Bear Branch and the West Fork San Jacinto have demonstrated what the realistic extreme looks like.
