Would levelling and turfing this garden be a huge job?

[beansagain]

This house ticks a lot of the boxes for us but is in much worse nick than the photos suggest. It needs new windows, new kitchen, new bathrooms, new carpets, new kitchen flooring, re-organising the first floor layout, painting, plastering throughout and that's before we even get a survey done. If we do make an offer, it will reflect this.

The garden also needs leveling though as it's not very big and we definitely want as much grass as possible and a patio half the size of theirs. It's a terraced house so we'd really need to do the garden first so that we don't have builders traipsing through the house with tonnes of soil AFTER we've sorted out the inside.

Anyway, we're near the top of our budget on this one so really need to work out how much we'd have to spend. I can guess at the cosmetic stuff but anyone got any idea what we're looking at for leveling and turfing the garden? I'm happy to have one lot of steps but much closer to the house as I don't want a huge patio.

its hard to tell about it being levelled - is it raised because the gardens either side are raised too?

Yes, it's built on a hill. Next door has leveled theirs so they have a patio and steps up to a single long raised area (what I want) but it was done before the current owners moved in so they don't know how much it cost.

Could you get an estimate from a local landscape gardener. He could point out possible difficulties and extra costs. Lovely house. Is the back South facing?

if its on a hill you need to start thinking about retaining walls being built if they aren't already there. you also need to think about access for any machinery they might need to help with levelling.

I can see what you mean about the bathrooms and windows but does it REALLY need a new kitchen? You may want something different but I would be surprised if the vendors took that in to account when considering your offer. Ditto the flooring, the change in layout and indeed the garden. None of that HAS to be done and ususally issues of that sort don't materially reduce the value of the house. I notice what looks like the house next door sold in January this year for 590,000 but that didn't have the converted loft with en-suite. It does have the levelled garden though and looks like it's been done up for sale. I would contact the agents who sold that and see if they can get you in touch with the developer or contractor to find out cost. But don't reckon on getting that off the purchase price. I wouldn't accept an low offer on that sort of basis and I think a lot of people would think like me.

Nice house OP, and while I see what you are saying with regards to certain things (windows, bathroom) requiring work, I'm afraid I agree with Northernlurker and don't think you stand much chance in getting a price reduction purely based upon aspects of the house you'd want to change.....

For example, many buyers expect to change a kitchen when they take possession of a new home - indeed, in DH's past life as a designer, he visited a multi million £££ property that had been 'done up to sell' with such fixtures as a mega-bucks Clive Christian kitchen. On arrival at the house he found said kitchen butchered and in several skips on the driveway - the new owners hated it and had no hesitation in having their builders rip it out, regardless of cost! Doubt they knocked a hundred grand off their offer though.....

Our current house had a dated 1990s cream, functional kitchen (with a couple of saving graces (granite work surfaces and an aga) when we bought it last year. We're in the process of fitting a new kitchen in one of the receptions as the original room intended as a kitchen is too small for our requirements. We didn't consider dropping our offer to reflect this as it's purely our taste and choice.

Regarding the garden levels, I'd try getting some quotes from local landscape gardeners. We considered doing something similar here - our house is actually built into an escarpment - but as the garden is considerably larger and we don't have young DC to worry about we've decided to leave as is and embrace the quirkiness!

This might seem like a really odd question to ask, but how high is your garden compared to your neighbours'?

I only mention it because I hadn't really noticed that our (stone, so might be different) townhouse had a garden a bit higher than our neighbours'. When we came to excavate, we realised that that was because our garden was full of unused/damaged stone blocks (so the guys that built the row of houses had obviously based themselves on our plot a few hundred years ago. It was ££ to get rid of it as landfill

This might be a cultural thing (west-country townie), but are you really going to be spending so much time in the garden vs local parks or the beach to warrant spending big £? DD much prefers parks or countryside to the back yard.

I remember someone saying that pricing garden work should be treated the same way as redecorating your rooms. So calculate sq m surface of your garden and think of it as 3 or 4 more rooms to redecorate.

IMHO all the work you listed would be well over 60K, possibly 80K (depending on the kind of materials you are using and if you are rewiring etc. There are sash windows in this house and they are very, very expensive.

Thanks for the comments especially re checking the level against neighbours' gardens and rule of thumb for pricing garden work.

As for the kitchen, I know it looks lovely in the pics but it's actually really grotty. There are some big cracks in the floor tiles and the kitchen units are ill-fitting and have some big bubbles where moisture must have leaked in behind the vinyl. It's not urgent (the bathrooms are!) but something we'd have to do in the next two to three years. Also, the first floor layout is not great. They stuck up a partition wall in one of the bedrooms to create two bedrooms and the work (including electrics) looks pretty shoddy so I think that needs pretty urgent sorting out too.

Nothernlurker, it's a really good idea to see if we can contact next door's developer to see what they think it will cost to sort the garden. I'll do some investigation now.