From a swamp to a perfect lawn in 6 days

The Brief:

This back garden in Caterham, Surrey was one the hardest installations we have ever had to do in 16 years. Prior to an extension being built on the side of the house the area was supposed to have had all the soft clay soil removed and a soakaway put in to sort out the drainage. The soft clay hadn’t been removed and the soakaway had been filled with more clay! Not an ideal start for a job.

Our Work:

Because the side extension had now started we were not able to access the garden with a digger which made sorting out the water issue very difficult. We had to manually dig out the 2 foot of clay soil on top of the soakaway and remove the other soft clay areas. We then sourced, collected and added 9.5 tonnes of 50-70mm recycled stone, which was used in the wet areas and in the top of the soakaway. This would allow the water to escape.

The install could then as proceed as normal. Heavily concreted in fixings were put in around the perimeter. Then doing our best to take the worst of the slope out, we used 20 tonnes of Type one, topped with 8 tonnes of granite dust. The Rectory grass was fitted.

The end result looked amazing however, I will never trust a builder again, as the stress caused by simply not doing as they had been instructed, mean’t using 15 tonnes more aggregates than required and adding 2 extra days labour on a very straight forward job.