Artificial grass, easy to remove?

[LovesFood1987]

We're continuing our house hunt and have found a great house with (in our opinion) hideous artificial grass in the front and back gardens.

We totally appreciate some people love this but it's not our thing, is it a major ordeal to have it removed? Is it expensive?!

It's usually laid over a compacted hardcore type base, so you'd have to dig that out and get soil put back in if you wanted to lay real grass

Peel it back in one corner and have a look at what is underneath, it is probably laid compacted stone which will need to be dug out.

Depends what is underneath, sometimes actual lawn (however dead) is poured over with actual concrete. Then peeling off AstroTurf is easy, but breaking off concrete is completely another story.

It's normally laid over sand on top of a compacted hardcore base. So it will be removable with a small digger, or a lot of pick axing and manual digging. You'll need to replace the hardcore with soil before laying turf, so that'll cost a bit.
Before removing it ask the neighbours what the drainage is like. The number one reason so many gardens where I live have fake grass is terrible drainage. The gardens with real grass turn into unusable, muddy swamps in the winter. Fine if you don't actually use the grassed area, awful if you have kids and dogs. Just something to think about.

It's not that difficult to put in drains and a soakaway, though if it is a new one you may need Building Regs approval. Much cheaper than putting down a hardcore base. And much better for the environment in most cases.

BlueMongoose I don't know about our neighbours but we did exactly that. Drainage improved slightly but the garden was still a swamp in Winter.
As is typical of new build estate companies, our houses are built on an area marked on historical maps as ' Bog', which explains why there's such an issue with drainage in the area. The only effective solution to enable practical use of the gardens seems to be removing the turf and replacing with slabs, stones or fake grass.

May be easy to remove, but remember to budget getting rid of it.

A lot of normal disposal sites/tips won't take it.

Poorly installed artificial “grass” will make poor drainage worse, there’s nowhere for the water to be absorbed. It should have a drainage base under the flat base, if it doesn’t then water will accumulate.