Anyone had their entire garden redone/landscaped? Can I ask how much it cost?

[IHeartKingThistle]

We have a disaster of a garden that needs professional help! It is very wide and wraps around the house at both sides (detached house) but is also very shallow - less than 4 metres from back of house to hedge. The hedge is massive, made of various trees and bushes, and backs onto a lane so needs to stay. It is full of brambles and nettles.

There is a crappy old patio in a place that gets no sun, so that needs removing. There is a massive old compost heap. The lawn is sloping and mostly made of moss. There are fences on both sides - one is broken and one is covered in old creepers. There are tree stumps and random gravelled areas that the previous owners put in.

Told you it was bad!

We would like to level it, add a small patio and a large deck, restrain then hedge somehow with a mowing strip or low wall, and just generally make it look less of an embarrassment. It's going to be a big job!

I've been saving for this for a while but have no idea how much I might need. Does anyone have any experience of doing a job like this?

Oh I forgot the metal estate fencing and handmade garden gates.

My garden is approx 72sq m (and in Surrey)

Morebeta I take it it's a lot then?!

Lets just say its cost £2500 for the bricks and that's before laying them. The cheapest thing will be the roses.

As MrSimms suggests above can you find a local person who can do all the clearance etc for you because it sounds like that is the most over-whelming bit.
Are you at all interested in designing it yourself? I have a similar project (although bigger and will take forever) and have got an amazing local tree surgeon who works for himself but will also turn his hand to loads of other stuff. Charges me about £120 a day. So I am going to take two weeks off around Easter and get a digger for a week which he can operate (our local Jewson has them for about 180 a week) and blitz the whole thing. We need to level lawn too so I'm going to get him to also do that and the pathways etc with the digger. Then lay all the paths ourselves (once the digging is done that's actually fairly simple) and then get a professional company to lay lawn as there's a lot of lawn and I can't face that bit. I don't know anything about decking as I've never done it.
I just think it would probably be a lot cheaper if you can find a one man band. Unless of course you want to throw money at it. But you could probably spend your £2K on the hard-scaping bits alone. Do you need to plant loads too?

Wowsers MoreBeta - sounds amazing. Are you in David Austin heaven?

Not much to plant due to mammoth hedge. It's more of a beating back Nature sort of job! But I do want real grass, NOT moss!

Moss is a strong indication you've got poor drainage. What kind of soil is it? Last time I saw a moss lawn it had solid sandstone under the topsoil.

Is it? We've done moss killer once and it seemed to work, but the moss has rallied. Not sure what the soil is but it's absolutely full of stones. And brambles. Could it be anything to do with the roots of the massive hedge, or the fact that it blocks so much light? A good portion of said hedge is laurel, unfortunately.

We are doing ours in bits. First job was clearing a hill of brambles, cutting down leylandi hedges which were ten metres high, I kid you not, taking out a couple of trees and stripping some hideous creeper things off a wall.

That took three men a week and cost 1k - but we are in Scotland and used a local guy. The rest we're doing in bits. But once you get the worst of the mess out, doing it in bits is achievable.

Laurel is dense shade so encourages moisture and moss, it costs that much because you are doing it all in one go and any hard landscaping is expensive.

Try thinning the hedge, to encourage light. Mix plant with hawthorn, blackthorn, maple, beech. Gardening isn't a quick fix, moss will return if the conditions are right so it needs to be treated on a regular basis.

It's hard to suggest things without seeing it but if I had your budget I would use he 2k for the hard landscaping and employ a gardener with a qualification Hort dip. Or similar to gradually turn it around. If you both work together to get it under control it will be cheaper for you.

cooper44 - oh yes its getting the full David Austin treatment.

I am putting a Shropshire Lad climber in my back yard which has just been repaved in black bricks with a border. It also has a old brick wall around it which I have had various bodged repairs of grey cement chiselled out and then repointed with lime mortar to match the house. I look straight out of my kitchen onto the wall so it will be lovely to look at flowers in summer and rose hips in the winter.

All the roses in the front garden I have to choose yet but planning on growing a rose hedge along an iron fence as one feature.

It looks like a bomb site right now but getting there. Iron fence and rose arbour going in tomorrow, then paving, then two tonnes of horse manure, then planting, then turf and lights and gate.

Oh gawd.

We moved into our house about 5 years ago, and we haven't started on the garden. It is very much on the list, but neither DH nor I thought it would cost anything like this much.

It is a big garden by suburban standards, about 100 feet long and maybe 40 feet wide. Big patio, which is as wide as the house, then shallow borders each side of the length of the garden and turfed the length of the garden, between the borders. Its on a slight incline, so there are steps from the house to the patio, and steps from the patio onto the grass. We are in the south east, not in London, but inside the M25.

It doesn't look awful, but the patio is old and crumbling, the steps down to the grass and concrete and ugly, the borders are too shallow, and basically I feel that there is so much wasted potential. We have such good weather in the summer, and the DC love playing outdoors, so we spend a lot of time in the garden. I spend most of that looking around in complete dismay .

Judging by the amounts previous posters have paid, I think we need to budget about 40K. Does that sound about right? I don't want to get a designer involved until we are really in a position to do the work otherwise I would just be torturing myself! I am getting seriious garden envy here!

We spent 17k on the garden our old house (which was a few years ago). It is still a topic of 'discussion' between me and DH. It included new lawn, patio and bark area. And very expensive raised veggie patches.

We have a smaller garden now (we moved shortly after ...) and we are doing it much more slowly. We have a gardener helping us who has created a bark area for DD to play, and laid sleepers with my DH to create proper beds and put in grass seed. We then got professionals to do the patio, which cost about £4k (fairly big).

I much prefer doing it this way to be honest. It is taking much longer and is a bit of a learning curve but apart from the fact that it is much cheaper it is actually more fun. And the gardener maintains the garden too.

I would find an independent gardener (not a company) - perhaps someone not doing so much landscaping and garden design who can work with you to create your garden. I think things like patios are worth spending money on - maybe split the tasks into those that you can do yourselves (even with help) and those left to the professionals?

MsGee - I think you are right on doing it yourself to a certain extent. I did my own designs and will do all planting but got a really good local company to do the heavy ground clearance, walls and paving, I really physically cant do that myself.

My iron fence arrived unannounced an hour ago. I can barely lift the pieces and cant do that myself either - blacksmiths here tomorrow apparently.

I think £17k may be more or less what I am spending too.

WellTidy - if you are paying £40k I will do it for you.

WellTidy we have a large but suburban garden - the lawn is around 60ft x 40ft with a patio area of probably 40 x 30ft. We have had someone round to quote yesterday and although the quotes aren't through yet, he said "high singles or low ten" thousands rather than tens of thousands! That includes having the drive tarmacced (drive is 18ft x 12ft) and new garage doors.

We are in the East Midlands and using a local firm (we have a "little book" through the door each month which is great for finding local companies)

ETA we are having new latio? Some dodgy brickwork demolished, laid to lawn and flower beds

Thank god! I was using the otehr quotes on here and multiplying up due to square footage, which probably wasn't the best reasoning to adopt.

Just to be clear, I don't have 40K! But, you know, I am willing to accept quotes ...

I haven't even thought about the front drive (shingle at the moment, with a few beds). or the concreted area at the side of the house by the dining room which is truly appalling.

We have a similar sized garden and we're doing it in bits. Managed to lose the patio under a big deck, put weed control membrane and wood chips on all the flower beds, although now the retaining slabs are too short. It is satisfying once you find the right solution for each bit of the garden though. One solution was whacking a chicken run in the corner where nothing would grow...

Oh it's going to take ages! I want a magic wand!

Part of the reason ours cost £16K was because they did it all in two weeks so had extra labour. Our house has no access to the back garden apart from through the house so someone had to be here the whole time and we only had a two week window for it.

The company submitted three designs to us and we chose one, this was included in the cost, as were the plants. They were fantastic and I'm happy to recommend them if anyone wants to PM me. They're based in London.

I have a friend who is a gardener so he does me mates rates. To get a digger in and remove all the concrete (lots of paths, rockeries, pond and patio) and get the entire garden back to soil (65x30ft garden) was about £1000 including grab lorry and skip. The next part which will include rotivating the soil, topsoil, turfing, patio slabs, railway sleepers to make 2 large raised flowerbeds, painting the shed which is a horrible shade of green, revarnishing fences and painting a garden wall will be about another £3600 but we are laying the patio ourselves and doing the varnishing and painting. This doesn't include the cost of any plants though.

In Novemember we had 12 ft high & 5 ft wide hedges removed from 30 qM garden all the way round, replaced with fencing and new gate, 2 new patios and pathway/steps etc- all indian natural stone and french doors installed-machines/diggers were needed but it was only 4k for the lot!!! Needs some new turf in the spring and I have a 20ft x 3 ft planting area to fill, so all the hard landscaping is done and just the naice part-planting to finish off! Bargain! but it was son in law who done the work, through his boss' company!