Reddit reviews Greywater, Green Landscape: How to Install Simple Water-Saving Irrigation Systems in Your Yard

The mechanics of it is quite simple, but there are a few seemingly minor steps that you need to take in order to avoid problems long-term. In the end, I bought this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Greywater-Green-Landscape-Water-Saving-Irrigation/dp/1612128394

And followed its step-by-step instructions for a laundry-to-landscape (L2L) system.

I did the installation myself, and I think anyone who can dig a trench and deal with roots along the way can assemble it. It's basically a plastic hose in the ground with 5-7 smaller hoses that branch off to irrigation boxes. Each of those boxes is in a ~10 foot trench I filled with mulch to provide more disbursement of the water. You could have the line outfall into the trench on the surface but 1) that doesn't look as cool and 2) for some reason that's illegal in my state.

I had the advantage of having my washing machine hookups on an exterior wall, and having the area I want to landscape slightly downhill from my washing machine. So this meant that I could rely on the pump in the washing machine to push the greywater through the system.

I set aside two weekends to do the job, but my mulch delivery had to be scheduled later, so it ended up heading into a third weekend. In retrospect, that was a gift. Trenching was the most effort and took the most time, but I did it by hand. I was trying to minimize distance and turns, so I ended up encountering quite a few roots that I needed to cut out or feed the line under. It's not a big deal but it's tiring and time consuming. I gave myself a day to do the indoor plumbing just in case I encountered problems, but it went rather smoothly.

One lesson learned is that you might be better off just buying the amount of coarse mulch that you need for your trenches. My local government offers free mulch delivery, so I ordered "half a truck" which was the smallest option. But "truck" means dump truck, so I ended up with a massive pile of mulch on my driveway. I filled my trenches, remulched every inch that wasn't lawn, and offered free mulch delivery to my neighbors just to get my driveway clean. A 30-minute job ended up taking all day. My kids did enjoy climbing mulch mountain and "helping" fill the wheelbarrow. But in retrospect, I could have just spent $100 on coarse mulch bags and been done in an hour.