my foundation guy told me a french drain is like $30/foot. I'm just going to build my own.
He quoted 130', so based on your guy's price, that is about $3900. I guess he wants to do some more smooth, decorative gravel which will increase the cost but decrease the likelihood that my children will become injured if they fall on it. Maybe my guy isn't too far off. We're still going to get another couple of quotes.
My house kind of sits on a slope, so it's about 30' from my foundation. But it just pools in my backyard along the fence. It's annoying as hell. Our backyard is big but effectively worthless because it's a mosquito infested swamp land.
French drain is in. Took them a while to get to it with the wet summer, but the last rock was delivered today. Got a pretty nice system in place where they connected my sump pump and down spouts into the drain. Multiple catch basins and a grate to get the biggest amounts in the lowest spot. They even were able to keep some of the trees and plants that we had put in the area around the dry creek bed. They also leveled out my yard in a couple of spots and did seed and hay to help with the revitalization.
We also had them clear out a bunch of crap under our deck (it's was just a 200 sq. ft. mud and weed trap), do some steel edging, weed barrier, and decorative rock. That looks really nice now, too.
All in all, it was $5900. But they pretty much redid my entire backyard.
Mowing tonight to clean and tidy everything up, but really happy with how it all turned out. Can recommend 4T Total Lawn care.