Del the Builder is our builder at Townscapes Landscape Contractors which is run by my husband, Peter Garland. If you commission me to design your garden you might well therefore want him to organise the build in which case you will have our builder, Del, doing the build! He has been with us for 20 years and is without doubt the best brickee, builder, paviour etc that you can find and therefore this blog is almost a diary as to how his day and his problems go… I am dealing with the top part of the above plan (a wedge shaped space) to start with which I will call the back yard… it was formed by the clients pushing out a large extension between their house and garage which left a rather dull empty space at the back – they felt sure it had potential (being Australians they were thinking BarBQs etc) but couldn’t picture how it could form up – so they asked me to design the space. This is how it looked when we started. It is still unfinished but below the “before we started” photos you will get an idea as to how it is looking now. It has white rendered walls retaining flower beds and coped with basalt paving stones to match the ground paving (and on which to sit/perch), it has a blade water feature and space for the BBQ and table etc. It is a small space created into a welcoming entertaining area with the highest standards of building work. Every few days I’ll give you an update on Del’s progress… try not to yawn too much.. it’s a hard slog!!
Burntwood Lane, Wandsworth, back yard before we started
Burntwood Lane, Wandsworth, back yard before we started
The start! First things first – order 1 skip and start clearing the back yard. Remove all existing planting in the bed and scratch our heads as to whether we are keeping the rather nice mature Acer tree in the corner. But no, it has to be a casualty, because new raised beds will mean it will probably die anyway as we can’t replant it to a new height and its roots won’t fit well into new retaining walls. The client wants a proper good looking step out from the house at floor level so we have to drop the back yard level by 150mm in order to accommodate the new base plus the paving on top and yet still have a step down of 125mm. Dig out trenches for bases for walling for raised beds and water feature area to be dug out deeper (500mm). ALL the debris has to be taken in barrows through the new extension, through the new garage and tipped into skip… more excitements to come!
Burntwood Lane, Wandsworth, space cleared