How much would you expect to spend on landscaping?

[WellTidy]

Our garden is about 100feet long x 40 feet wide. There is a side return and side access both sides (detached house). Massive patio and four steps down from the centre of the patio (sloping beds either side) to a big rectangle of grass with raised beds to the right and a border to the left. We are in Greater London.

We would like to landscape the whole thing. We could keep some of the planting, but would like to replace all of the hard landscaping.

I’ve spoke to a garden designer who said that roughly, their design fees tend to seen to be worth it when the construction costs are in the region of £80k upwards. Obviously the design would be on top.

Is this in the region of what should be expected? Its more than I had in mind, but maybe my expectations are a long way out.

We paid approx 7k for hard landscaping a 30m2 patio in a sandstone slabs.
This didn't include lighting or electrics. We did the turfing and planting ourselves and put in a new shed. We're in the east mids.

It does sound as though you are covering a larger area but 80k sounds a lot, even for London. I guess it depends on what materials you are using - porcelain for example would bump the price up I imagine.

Until the recent increase in material costs you could have had a fairly sizeable single storey extension for that (we're in greater London and have a similar size garden). It really depends what you want done. No amount of landscaping (if you mean planting, fencing etc) will recoup that kind of spend in a garden, unless you're also talking about including garden buildings such as a full home office set up etc.

In 2020 we had an 8 m x 6 m patio laid, it's raised, with steps off on both sides, and a raised sleeper planter bordering two sides. It cost about 8k, labour and materials. If you know what you want done, ie where you want a patio, decking etc, I'd probably scope out some companies that do this and ask them to price up those bits and see what sort of numbers you are getting.

Sounds right to me. I paid 16K for 21 feet by 14 feet garden. That was 3 years ago. Labour costs then where about £50 per person per day. It took 4 men 16 days.

Cost of the stone plus rubbish disposal were also huge.

I would look into paying a garden designer just to work out what you want, and then get someone in separately to lay the hard paving. If you want to keep some of the planting, then how much you want to keep or change, budget for that and go from there. It also depends on what pavers you want to use, and how high spec you want.
We have a garden about 160 x 40 and have paved about 30x50 plus side return with porcelain. That came in around 10k, finished last year. We did the rest ourselves, including returning, planting, land drains etc. So it depends how much you want to try stuff yourself too. Can you give any more details on what you what to end up with ?

Returfing not returning

I’ve realised that I’ve been thinking about the cost of a new garden. I haven’t considered the coat of demolishing the existing (cracked) patio and retaining walls of the beds etc and removing all of that.

I think I will ask a local landscaping firm to come and give a view.

We won’t be here forever, so although I would like it to look good, I (much as I would like to) won’t be choosing things like porcelain or top end composite decking. I think we will keep some planting but not much of it - I’d like to start again really, have fewer but deeper beds, and keep to a tighter colour scheme (all the greens, white, purple and blue) and plant in drifts.

It’s just cost me £1800 to have a stone edged 7m2 lawn laid. If we’d also wanted them to do the hard landscaping like the patio, raised beds etc then we were looking at 8-10k. We decided to keep the existing patio and do the planting ourselves and also laid a gravel path ourselves.

Two friends of mine have paid for landscaping. One paid 16k and one paid 25k. Their gardens are a similar width one is maybe half the length and the others is really quite a small garden maybe 30ft long.

Can you do anything yourselves at all? DS and DH cleared a big flowerbed at the end of our garden in lockdown and built a 20 x 20ft patio area it still cost a couple of thousand. My friend has just had a quote for a patio that’s a little bigger and it’s 10k.

80K sounds very pricey to me. I'm in North west london and just had my garden done - 2 x patio, re-turfing, all the rubbish away, and materials etc for 25K - I attached the quote details.

I paid £18K for new patio, new 6 foot lolliop fence, water and electric put across the garden and a retaining wall built (low one), turfing.

Small garden - but there was a lot to move out.

All the planting I've done myself and the garden design.

We were told that we'd currently be looking at around £200/m2 for paving etc. including getting rid of the existing paving. That's about double what it would have been a couple of years ago.

Now looking at other options!

6 months ago, we finally finished our landscaping project. We have a 36m2 patio, so we spent 45k pounds to make it all real (including the price of a tractor and other tools). We didn’t hire anyone because we decided to do the job ourselves. Of course, it would have taken us less time if we had hired some designers. Still, it was a great pleasure to do the design ourselves. As for 80k, it seems very expensive. You’ll definitely overpay if you agree. As I’ve said, we’ve spent 45k, having even bought this tractor at machinerydealer.co.uk and other tools, and it’s still less than 80k. Still, the choice is up to you. Keep us updated