Paved garden to lawn, beds, raised veggies...

[startingoveragainagain]

I'm looking at houses and quite like the house, but the garden isn't a garden. How would I go about doing this, or do I need a professional and if so, how much to do this?

It depends on how they've laid the paving and what's underneath.

If it's just laid on a bed of sand and you have decentish soil underneath, you could just lift up paving slabs where you want flower beds, add lots of manure and plant up.

If there's a load of concrete under there though, it would be really tricky. Raised beds maybe? You would have to break up whatever is under for drainage, then build raised beds and bring in new soil.

As above - also, even if it’s ‘just’ a case of sand under the slabs, removing them and creating grass, beds etc is going to involve a deal of work. It’s entirely doable but isn’t going to be a doddle.

You have to wonder at the reasoning behind this. Is it them or the site?

The neighbours are in brilliant sunshine but 'your' garden isn't - do you think that hardly anything grew so they went for hard landscape instead. Or maybe it's rubbish soil. Or still builders' rubble underneath.
Have a look at the gardens either side, they might give clues as to soil type and what is/isn't possible.

We took up 4 slabs at a time and gradually made beds. We were learning so mini gardens in the concrete were an easy and manageable way to go

Looking at google maps all the gardens around them have grass, so I think it must have been a choice.

In that picture the garden looks shaded although it looks like a sunny day.

It would be worth thinking about the orientation of the plot and how much sun it'll get (it may be that its just the time of day??). The garden in the pictures does have plants and beds etc, it's not just a totally landscaped look, and that combined with the shade in the photos makes me wonder whether previous owners have found it hard to grow a lawn.

I think it must have been a choice.
I thought it might be so (the photo with weeds doesn't exactly scream "we are gardeners", does it) but it was worth checking.
Did the photographer catch the garden at a bad time or is it really that bad, with a "sunhouse" in the shade! 😂 Does the thought of that much shadiness bother you?

My garden would look dark like that at this time of year due to the height of the sun/still short days (in Scotland), but in a month’s time it will be a complete sun trap from 1 to 7pm - faces south west and is shaded by the neighbouring tenements and tall trees until a certain time of year so is lovely April to September.
I took away paving to make a couple of flower beds and there was an awful lot of digging to get out the sand and rubble underneath, with trips to the tip with rubble sacks. A skip would be less hassle.