Many homeowners have excessive water near or under their houses. Over the summer, some of my wife’s flowers next to our house became sick from waterlogged soil. To remedy the problem, I installed a buried pipe from a gutter downspout to help with our drainage. The supplies cost $34. Here are steps of how I did the job.
1. I purchased 12 feet of 4-inch perforated, corrugated black drain pipe long enough to move water away from the house into the grass in the yard ($8), one downspout adapter ($5), one 90 degree elbow fitting, and 4 bags of gravel ($3/bag). If you have soil with slow infiltration (high clay content) or a slope back towards the house, you will need a longer pipe to drain to the nearest ditch. 
2. I dug a 1 foot deep trench with a shovel through our flower bed into the yard, carefully piling the grass sod to use later.
3. I placed the pipe in the trench to be sure it fit.
4. Then I removed the pipe, distributed two bags of gravel along the bottom of the trench, put the pipe back in, poured the last two bags over the top, and put a narrow strip of landscaping cloth over the top to prevent plant roots from growing into the pipe perforations.
5. I filled in the trench with soil and pressed the grass sod back where I dug it.
6. The final step was to cover the flower bed with landscape cloth, plant fall flowers, and spread pine mulch.
For the next few days, I watered the section of replaced sod and flowers until they established new roots.