Patios, decking, fencing, turf, clearance and planting
Taking a tree out often leaves a garden that needs something doing to it. Rather than hand you on to somebody else, we do that half too.
Six things, and in every one of them the part that decides whether it lasts is the part that ends up buried: the sub-base, the frame, the post hole, the soil.
Hard landscaping and soft, for homes and for commercial sites.
Laid on a compacted sub-base with a fall, so water leaves and the slabs stay flat.
Treated frames, joists at 400mm centres and air underneath.
Posts set deep, gravel boards down, old concrete dug out and taken.
Ground prepared properly before a single roll of turf goes down.
Overgrown borders cut back and everything taken away the same day.
Bare root hedging in the dormant window, planted to live.
Three things it changes about how the work is done.
Failed patios are almost never failed slabs. They are a sub-base that was too thin and a fall that was never set. The same is true of decks and fences, where the frame and the post hole decide everything.
Water has to go somewhere, and away from the house. A fall of roughly one in eighty is invisible to look at and the reason a patio is not a puddle in November.
Turf goes down best in autumn. Bare root hedging goes in between November and March and costs a fraction of pot grown. Timing is free, and it is most of the difference between a plant living and sulking.
Tell us what you want to end up with. Photographs and rough measurements are enough to have a sensible conversation about budget before anybody commits to anything.
Yes, and that is usually the sensible order. Clearing or felling first means the patio, fence or lawn can be priced against ground you can actually see, and it means no digger driving over a new lawn a fortnight after it was laid.
For most back garden work, no. The ones to check are paving a front garden with more than five square metres of non-permeable surface, a raised deck over 300mm, and a fence over two metres, or over one metre beside a road. Listed buildings and conservation areas have their own rules.
Yes. A patio dig produces far more spoil than people expect, and old fence posts come out with their concrete rather than getting snapped off at ground level. It goes on the truck.
A fence run is often a day or two. A patio is usually several days, with the digging rather than the laying as the slow part. We will give you a realistic span at the quote instead of an optimistic one.