Trade
Garden renovation
The whole garden out and back in, with a scale drawing before the first spade goes in.
A renovation starts with measuring, not with clearing. We come round with a tape, a level and a soil auger, and by the end of that hour you know three things: how deep the usable soil sits, how much fall there is between your doorstep and the back boundary, and where the water can go.
Only then does a drawing follow. It is not a pretty picture but a scale plan with the measurements on it and the drainage line drawn in. What you get afterwards is a quotation in which groundworks, hard surfacing and planting each have their own line, so you can see where the money goes and where you could cut.
The work runs in four stages, always in this order: clear and dispose, groundworks and drainage, hard surfacing, planting. A garden where the planting goes in before the drainage is a garden that gets built twice.
Closed over at most
50%
We will not build a garden that is more than half hard surface. On this ground the water has to go somewhere.
Lead time
3 to 6
Working days for a garden up to a hundred square metres, spread over two weeks.
We come back within
12mo
Anything we plant that fails to take, we replace within a year at no cost.
What you can check yourself
Walk the garden after heavy rain and look for where the water sits. If it is still there twelve hours later, that is where the renovation starts, whatever you had planned.
What is itemised separately
Groundworks, disposal, hard surfacing and planting each get their own line and their own figure. Without that split you cannot tell what happens if you halve the budget.
What handover means
A planting plan with the species named, a photograph of the drainage line before it was covered, and a date when we come back to check what has taken.
First whether it can be done, then what it costs
Photograph the spot where the water stands. That answers half the question on its own.
The background, if you want to read further
Why a garden in Amsterdam-Noord is built differently from one on sandy soil. According to the city’s own groundwater assessment framework, the ground here runs from top to bottom as a made-up layer of one to five metres containing sand, clay and rubble, then a poorly permeable layer of peat and clay several metres thick, and only at around twelve metres the first sand layer. That made-up layer is the only one that lets water through and the only one connected to the open air.
Almost everything that goes wrong in these gardens follows from that. The house stands on piles reaching the sand at twelve metres and does not sink; the garden sits on the made-up layer and does. After twenty or thirty years the terrace is below the doorstep, water runs towards the wall, and the fence posts lean. Rainwater that cannot drain raises the water table in the garden, which is exactly the condition in which roots suffocate.
A renovation that ignores that is a new layer over the same problem. What we do is treat drainage as the first item rather than the last: where can the water go, how much comes off the roof, and does the garden keep enough open ground to hold it. The city even pays towards this. The Amsterdam green subsidy scheme pays 15 euro per square metre for lifting paving, from ten square metres up to a maximum of 1,000 euro per home, with a five-year obligation to keep it that way. Tenants are excluded from the scheme.
Questions about garden renovation
How long does a garden renovation take?
For a garden up to about a hundred square metres we work to three to six working days, spread over two weeks because there is a day between the groundworks and the paving on which nothing happens. If machinery cannot get down a rear lane, add roughly half again: hand work costs about double.
What does a full renovation cost per square metre?
We charge 95 to 175 euro per square metre including Dutch VAT (btw) for a complete rebuild. That is a real band and not a "from" price: the bottom is a garden with a lot of lawn and little paving, the top has a retaining wall, a large terrace and mature planting. The prices page shows which published sources sit underneath it and where they contradict each other.
Does the garden have to be cleared completely first?
No, and clearing everything is often a waste of money. A mature tree, a healthy hedge or a terrace that is still sitting level does not come out just because it is in the way. During the survey we say per element whether it stays or goes, and why. What stays comes straight off the disposal figure, and that figure is larger than most people expect.
Can this be done in autumn or should I wait for spring?
Groundworks and paving run all year except in frost. Planting prefers autumn: roots keep growing while there is no leaf, so by the following spring the plant already has a root system. A garden planted in October needs less watering in May than one planted in April.
Torn between two solutions
Put both to us. We will say which of the two lasts longer on this ground, and why.
The neighbourhoods where we do this
What this trade means in practice differs per neighbourhood. The page for your own one says what applies where you live.
What else people call us for
Your request
Six fields and a photo. With the area and the type of garden we can name a band before coming out; without those two, any answer is a guess.
Start with a photo
One photo from the back door showing the whole garden almost always saves a trip. Send two if you like: one of the whole and one of the spot where it goes wrong.