I'm in an area that is experiencing some serious rainfall due to the latest hurricane. Earlier this summer, after a flood happened in a lower level area of the house and cost us $1500 even with doing much of the remediation work ourselves, we went searching for solutions from improved gutters to drains. Everyone was booked solid for the last 4 months and those that could come out quoted $5k for drainage systems. Heck no!
Our gutters on the floody side are still patchy, but those are getting fixed fairly cheap in a few weeks. What our local City government recommended instead of a french drain was installing a rain garden:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_garden Why not, couldn't hurt to try - right? Plus it helps the watershed by keeping the water in the table instead of in the sewer.
I rented a tiller a few weeks ago from HD, plowed through an area 10' away from house. Tilled eight inches of clay and rock and created a berm. Routed the gutter over there and taped the holey gutters up to the best of my ability. Planted a few small, cheap Lantanas that will flourish in the flood/drought continuum.
When the storms hit this morning at 4am and our flood warning notices went off I couldn't help myself and went outside. Lo and behold, the water is far away from the house and in the rain garden. 4-5" in our area in 12 hours is no joke. (There are a few buckets to catch what the tape didn't get, but it was relatively effective.) Just for fun, stuck a (still cheaper than remediation) HydraSorber flood barrier out in front of the door but the area was so dry it wasn't impactful.
After lunch, I'm taking a mid-day nap to congratulate myself on a job well done.