Cost of garden for newbuild

[Weta]

I know this is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question, but can anyone give me a very rough idea of how much we should budget for the garden for our newbuild? The garden is 80 square metres, with a patio taking up 20 square metres of that. It will be levelled off but I'm guessing we will need to put in compost/topsoil plus some lawn and plants etc.

It depends on how good a job you want.

It's likely that the builders have thrown all the rubble, sand, plaster waste, etc into the garden area, so the soil will be very poor. In addition, the soil will have been compacted by machinery. This will mean that the drainage is probably very poor, and you are likely to get standing pools of water on the surface of the ground. (It depends on whether you've got clay soil, sandy soil or something in between.) Putting top soil on this will really just result in a nice layer of soil on top of very poor soil, but you'll still have the drainage problems and the plants will only be able to get their roots down a certain distance before running into the standing water and compacted soil.

I do have friends who had to take up the turf and patio the builders laid and re-do it properly.

Take a bit of a look here for the RHS's advice page apps.rhs.org.uk/advicesearch/Profile.aspx?pid=632

I'm really interested in this too, so.... bump

I don't have a new build but we extended the lawn area of our garden earlier this year. The top soil was £40 a ton, (we could have got this cheaper if we had collected it or had it delivered loose rathervthan in bags) we the used grass seed which was less than a £10 for the box much cheaper than turf and it looks really good, by the end of summer you could hardly tell the difference between this and the established lawn next to it.

Just reread grendelsmums post and it reminded me of moving into a new build when I was a child, my dad and I went round the entire garden with a lawn edger breaking up the soil and removing the larger stones and bits of rubble. I don't remember having anything other than a nice lawn to play on so presume this worked.

Sorry to have taken so long to come back, the last couple of days have been crazy!

Thanks for all the comments and for that link Grendelsmum.

MrsLyman - how many tons of topsoil did you need (and what size of area did it cover)?

We had 2 tonnes for about 4/5 m2 but we were filling a hole from where we had dug up concrete so you probably wouldn't need to go that deep.

If you start levelling and taking away soil then this is costly. Laying a quality patio is no longer cheap and you can easily pay £60m2 - £80m2 for a wicks sandstone type laid. Properly laid on hardcore, blinding etc so you could say £1200 for the patio.

A team of say two men are going to charge £250 per day labour min. A truck and trailer for the removal and turf import etc. Levelling depends but you can work out the cubic area to be removed. You start levelling then you have to build small walls or structures.

Difficult to gauge could be around £3k. We priced one up for a garden on slope recently with laying pea gravel, patio, small retaining, shed base and the garden was tiny price came to £10k!!!

The developers are already going to level the ground and put in the patio. We may need a retaining wall but we already have a separate quote for that, so it really is just the garden proper - fixing up the soil and putting in lawn/bushes/raised bit for vegetables and maybe a pergola. We've budgeted around £2500 at the moment but have no idea whether that's about the right amount.