As a reminder, this is what my garden looked like before work started on it. The concrete slabs are held in place solely by friction and gravity, and the so-called fence was absolutely lethal – very fragile and barely able to hold up the weight of the honeysuckle and clematis that were growing over it, […]
The builders turned up on time on Tuesday, and have spent the last three days digging a series of large holes in my garden, which the steel I-beams will be concreted into. They have shifted literally tons of soil, clay and rock. In just about every hole they have dug so far, they have found […]
The landscape gardener came around again this evening, to confirm the price and agree a start date of immediately after the August Bank Holiday. I have agreed to pay up-front for the materials – specifically the steel I-beams and 300 new oak sleepers. That is not going to be cheap – but with a small […]
In the end I got two different builders to quote for doing the landscaping work on my garden. They came in within 10% of each other which I thought was pretty remarkable, and gives me reasonable confidence that is indeed the “price for the job”. The main difference between the quotes was that one proposed […]
I got a letter from the local council yesterday, informing me that my application for planning permission for the garden has been granted, with no additional conditions. I now have three years to get the work done – though obviously I’m not expecting it to take nearly that long. Now I “just” have to find […]
I was just about to leave for work this morning, when I saw a car pull up into my drive. For once, I wasn’t expecting any tradesmen to call today, so I was rather surprised. I went outside and greeted the chap with a somewhat stern “Who are you? And what do you want?”. “Errm, […]
I’ve blogged about the solutions that Chris and I had considered for the garden and rejected. That made me explicitly consider what I needed from a potential solution: Affordable Less ugly than the current concrete blocks Low (or preferably zero) maintenance Taking up as little additional space as possible I put these constraints to the […]
Herefordshire Council does free “planning surgeries” in Ledbury, where you can turn up without an appointment and ask for an informal opinion from a planning officer. I took along pictures of my garden, explained the problem, and asked whether I would need planning permission to sort it out. Obviously, I’d much prefer not, as it’s […]
I mentioned the other day that I want to sort out my garden. I thought I’d blog here about the ideas that Chris and I thought about and rejected. I’ll leave the current candidate solution for another time. As David A. pointed out in the comments to the previous post, the slope is intrinsically unstable […]
I think this is likely to be a long-running saga, which I shall spread over several posts and probably several months. You have been warned! This is what my garden looks like currently. It is heavily landscaped, with the first terrace (where this picture was taken) being as high as the house, and two further […]
