What is a realistic budget for landscaping a back garden?

[Bluebruin]

My neighbour has a postage stamp garden 5 panels long by 4 panels wide plus a patio. They paid 36k to have it landscaped and it took a staggering 10weeks. That money included a solid retaining wall which was covered in granite, ditto the patio. It looks like corporate London but each to their own. I give this for reference as local properties can absorb this expense. However I do think they over did it a bit with the granite. My garden is a bit bigger, 7 x 7 panels square. It really needs landscaping from scratch as it was ploughed up when we built an extension. I don't have 36k hanging around but we intend to save up & do it properly. What would be a realistic budget? Local houses sell for 1.5M.

Hard landscaping costs the most per sqm so depends how much patio, retaining wall, raised beds/ fencing you want/need.

soft landscaping is much cheaper per sqm for perennials and grass but if you want more substantial plants like trees, shrubs or topiary/trained woody plants - such as pleached tree panels then it adds up quickly.

Basically 20-30k is not far off a usual garden. But you could do it for much less if you only had a small bit of hard landscaping and did the rest of the soft scrape yourselves.

Wow. Well that's my dream out of the window

What?!!!!! We are thinking of saving this year to have ours done next year and without quotes , initial assumption was £5-£7k!!!! I think I'll be doing it myself at this price!

Ours cost about 7k. That was to install a composite decking area, level out a sloped grass area. We had a bedding area between the patio and grass area, which they planted up, new turf laid and small decking area for storage.

What?!

We just did ours and it cost 9k.

It's just cost us £4k to have our patio redone (average size) and the path running along the back and side of the house redone in Indian stone slabs rather than the concrete slabs that were there before. You don't get a lot for your money these days.

Your garden made perfect is good for gauging what can be done on different budgets.
So far we’ve DIYed ours, (the lawn alone is 100sqm so it’s a decent size) we’ve built a retaining wall and levelled a sloping garden (we live on a steep hill), turfed and built raised beds and spent:
£700 on new fence
£400 on skips m
£500 on gabion cages to build retaining wall
£500 on machinery hire
£25 on stones/type1 (DH gets materials cheap through work)
£400 on topsoil
£250 turf
£200 on railway sleepers for building raised beds
£200 on plants (more still needed my new shopping addiction!)
£1800 on decking (getting built shortly)
£1200 on garden furniture
Reduced 20ft leylandi hedge £300 (needs doing again)

Create a space in the garden for DS (we’ve an idea for a den)
We still need to remove and replace failed render on all the garden walls (quoted £1400 for new render)
Redo the patio terrace which wraps round the entire house (getting quotes for £15k to achieve this!)
Put in some kind of water feature for wildlife
Think about lighting

We live in the north and realise prices will have gone up in the time we’ve been doing this.

This is our fourth spring/summer of working on it it was ridiculously overgrown and unloved before but we’ve saved a lot by doing it ourselves. My DS now has a safe garden to play in (was a big brambly 6ft ditch at the bottom of the slope before!).

Depends on the house. £1.5m isn’t huge for London. But it is for some areas. So what might buyers expect and what do you want for yourself.

Indian Stone is very porous and can attract lichen. Black spots spoil it.

Millboard is a good product but expensive. External ceramics look good. Use grass and planting. A retaining wall is ££££. It’s a structural building! Not having one snd accepting a slope saves money. However if you need one, there’s no avoiding it.

Mine will have to stay the mess it is then.

Just had quotes for replacing patio and paths in the back garden with composite decking or tiles…£15-20k. That wouldn’t be any further landscaping, fences etc just the patio. We’re outskirts of London, but was about double what I was thinking but got 4 quotes and all the same ish.

£36 grand.

Sorry but what the actual fuck? Are they getting a one bedroom flat out there?

£36 grand where do you live?

I paid £2k for this. In the north west. £36kk what are they going to do ffs?

If you want to pay £30k I will do it myself for you

We had a quote for replacement patio, balustrade (live on a hill) some leveling, a new decked area with a canvas sail at the bottom of the garden & a path to it.

SE - over £65k 😱😱

I thought our budget of up to £20k was good…!!

We DIY’d ours over lockdown which included moving 4 tonnes of soil, removing a patio, creating a sleeper low wall, French drain, arch, steps, 5 tonnes of gravel, veg plot and loads of extra plants for about £1800.

It took months but we did it in stages and I am inordinately proud of what I achieved (with a bit of muscle from DH when needed).

House prices aren't relevant. Houses within that budget can have postage stamp sized gardens in London.
£36k for a garden 5 fence panels long is a complete rip-off.

The hard landscaping and other stuff for our garden came to 15k. It was done last spring:

New shed
2 x new patios (I large, 1 small) with porcelain tiles.
New retaining wall and steps
New side gate
Everedge lawn edging
6 new garden chairs from Ketler
Coffee table
Large parasol and base
1 fence panel
2 large trellis panels
2 large troughs for climbing roses

I spent a further £250 on planting last year.

This autumn we’ll replace 10 fence panels and get a path laid.

All in I reckon it will have cost us 20k.

We got a quote for 19K to redo our patio. We didn’t bother and jet washed the old one!

@ChillyB can I ask about the cages you've added as retaining walls? Did you have to have any kind of foundation/sub-ground level digging or are they heavy enough to hold the soil behind by themselves because of their weight?
Also, I've seen a few companies with sleepers but it's the delivery costs that are huge due to the size of the transporter needed.
I can't believe these prices either. We are slowly doing ours by ourselves too.

We did however redo our front which included taking away some walls and front garden, moving some steps, building a large retaining wall, fitting a glass balustrade and redoing the block paving which cost 30K. Gave us an extra much needed parking space though.

Landscaping is £££.

During lockdown, we had our garden done as it was effectively a jungle that couldn't be used.

4 skips (£1,200) plus 6 man days (£1,200) down, and we were ready to start.

We had:

10 brand new 6ft fence panels either side, plus 3 across the back (£2,800) plus fitting 4 man days (£800)

Indian sandstone patio of 10m2 including fitting (£2,000)

New lawn of 100m2 laid and bordered including fitting (£2,000)

Total cost = £10,000

While it looked gorgeous, this was a very very basic garden, on London/Surrey borders. I'm not surprised your neighbours was £36k, given they had the full works.

First picture is afterwards, second picture is about halfway through clearance, and a big tree had already been razed. It was a complete mess.

SW London (zone 3) here - we paid £6k last summer for our 5 panel x 4 panel sized garden. Whole garden cleared, 4 new fence panels, new patio laid, new lawn laid, borders with sleepers round the outside of the lawn, concrete basis for shed laid, new shed installed and painted. Two 2 weeks work by a couple of guys. Happy to recommend the landscapers to anyone in our area.

One word…. DIY! Prices are crazy unless you’re a millionaire!

Costs that are often forgotten in landscaping are clearing what is already there, to include disposal of it, and the design itself. Also access may complicate matters ie make it more expensive. Many people think that nearly all of what they’re paying for will be new (hard and soft landscaping). But lots of what you will pay for is unseen.

Also think about factoring in some follow up, where a landscaper comes back to see how everything is doing and advises on maintenance.

We have waited ages to do ours because it is so expensive. I think we could be in for £100K as we have levelling and therefore drainage issues (no access issues thankfully), a lot of clearance, would like to do some decent lighting, a couple of sitting areas, a good-size BBQ, new shed with potting shed … The list goes on.

@CatNamedEaster we bought the cages online, after checking with the company’s structural engineer that they’d retain the soil we needed with the height.
DH dug down about 10cm and 60cm wide and put a bed of type 1 down (used a whacker plate and levelled it). Then we filled the cages using stone we already had in the garden as it wasn’t important to us how it looked as you can see it, we took down a small wall, took out Yorkshire stone flagged paths, took out the stones round previous flower beds etc. He did get 5 tonne of gabion stones from
work too but again it cost us next to nothing due to being an employee.
On the face of the wall we have put the soil into we also put a membrane on to allow drainage and stop the soil washing through. Wall is really solid hasn’t moved an inch and is retaining somewhere in the region of 35 tonnes of soil. We did also put some left over stone in bottom of the trench we were filling.