Replacing artificial grass with real?

[Housemover18]

The house we are looking to buy has its garden 3/4 decking (which is ok, a bit overkill but fine) and 1/4 fake grass. It’s not a big area, maybe 2m x 2m or a little more - can anyone advise how much work is likely to be needed to turn this back to normal grass? Is it a case of lifting/digging/cutting out the fake grass and whatever layers are underneath it and then filling with soil and turf

Fake grass is usually laid on top of compacted hardcore then a layer of sand. Might be worth living with the garden for a bit though to get a feel for why they might have laid it. We've had it in our last two gardens as we have kids and dogs and in our first house it was a north facing garden with patchy grass which always looked shit no matter how often we re turfed or re seeded. In current house the lawn sloped and where it joined the path would get really wet, boggy and muddy. No way we'd go back to real grass, especially in a small space like you're talking about.

We have a rabbit and he will eat whatever is there - even if fake! The gardens either side have real grass, I just get the feeling that they wanted an easy life. There is also a ting patch at the front that they have AstroTurfed - no one else on the street has :/

Id contact a couple of gardeners for a quote, I’d imagine that digging out some of the hardcore and disposing of it might be quite hard work but I guess it depends how deep the topsoil needs to be for the grass to thrive.

Oh you could get a mesh under the turf to stop digging (rabbit or predator) if you have a run for him.